| You have to keep in mind that while technically you are correct, evolution has been running for at least 3 billion years. Fertility is the main thing it optimizes. To think you know the way this should work better than evolution is like betting you know adwords better than Google. In general it would be extremely safe to assume that human fertility is the best optimized part of the human genome and that in 1000 years we'll still be discovering factors that evolution took into account "designing" human fertility. There is (or will turn out to be) a very good reason for every single tiny detail about how our bodies procreate. If you can't see the reason, the fault is likely with you, and assuming otherwise is effectively betting against an algorithm that has had 3 billion years to ponder this question. It thinks slower than you, of course, but you're still quite unlikely to have the upper hand in that bet. > does all kinds of glitchy seemingly suboptimal things so aging is not perfect and divine because it's evolution This is how evolution works. It's called "mutation". And you're right. Species are a big fan of it, as it massively improves them. For the large, large majority of individuals, mutation is a small or large disaster. Every human is an experiment meant to improve the human species as a whole. This is great if you're a successful experiment, but the extremely large majority of individuals in any species will be a failed experiment that don't get to propagate their genes (meaning the genes that are different in that particular individual). The vast majority of individuals will turn out to have a (usually small) weakness that will get filtered out. Usually that will be something like a toe that's a few millimeters shorter than most, sometimes it's ALS. The key here is that evolution very likely won't decide any particular human is a success or failure until the human species gets into trouble again. When that happens, something like 98% or more of all lineages will go extinct, and until that happens, even evolution itself won't know or care what fitness even means. Unless you know what is going to cause the human species to lose >90% of it's population at some point, you have no point of comparison. |
This is more hedged than it really needs to be. In an infinite-integral-across-time sense, fertility is the only thing evolution optimizes.