Flagged for political content (eugenics, reproductive ethics).
Do you still call chemistry "Alchemy"? Because this isn't Eugenics.
Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'
51–60 of 66 posts
Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'
#52> Historically, these genes would not have been passed from mother to child as both would have died in labour. How do we know that? As the name implied, Caesar was born this way, a little over 2000 years ago. It's likely the procedure is much much older, too. So what timeframe are we talking about? What we didn't know how to do 100 years ago was how to save mother and child once birth had begun and the baby's head ha…
I also have a lots of doubt about this study, the article says 'Researchers estimate cases where the baby cannot fit down the birth canal have increased from 30 in 1,000 in the 1960s to 36 in 1,000 births today.'
1960 -> 2016 = 56 years, can natural evolution show signs so fast? Also 'cases where the baby cannot fit down the birth canal' is a subjective, standards may have evolved, maybe babies are also bigger?
Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'
#53> Historically, these genes would not have been passed from mother to child as both would have died in labour. How do we know that? As the name implied, Caesar was born this way, a little over 2000 years ago. It's likely the procedure is much much older, too. So what timeframe are we talking about? What we didn't know how to do 100 years ago was how to save mother and child once birth had begun and the baby's head ha…
It is probably just a myth that Caesar was born this way. At the time, the mother most likely couldn't survive a section, because the resulting infections would kill anyone who had such surgery performed. And Caesar's mother lived to old age.
This is the first Cesar that is born by cesarian is name is Scipio Africanus[1]
Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'
#54Going to potentially be controversial, but we need (might be a strong word here) genetic manipulation with strong ethical and humanist values attached to it (and a lot more knowledge). If we are to deny natural selection its role, then we might want to still prevent people from passing on genes which effectively handicap them when they don't have access to certain facilities and technology. Prevention in this case is…
That already happens sometimes: it's called IVF with PGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis). Before an embryo is implanted a cell is taken from it and tested for genetic defects. It's an expensive and convoluted process, so it's only done when one or both of the parents are carriers of a serious genetic mutation.
> it's only done when one or both of the parents are carriers of a serious genetic mutation
I have friends who have done PGD simply to select the gender of their child. Once researchers identify reliable genetic markers for height and intelligence, expect PGD to become rapidly more popular among the upper class.
Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'
#55Call me a sceptic.. since the invention of farming women have had little evolutionary pressure to run fast to catch food nor outrun predators. Why then haven't evolution widen the canal to reduce fatalities during childbirth? And this has been going on for much longer than caesarean procedures.
Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'
#56The way we live is very unnatural. That's why it is only logical that also our evolution is unnatural. Since we no longer have any natural enemies, we ourselves set up the rules, that decide over life and death. And these rules are wrong in many ways. You could write a whole book about it.
One chapter could be devoted to the resulting overpopulation that causes a variety of problems. Instead of letting politics, medicine and capitalism dictate our evolution, we should give nature more freedom. And if we further succeed in reducing the world population to 3 or 4 billions, a certain equilibrium could be reestablished in this world. I am ready to help.
Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'
#57Humans have been evolving more in the last 50,000 years that in the previous million (by bone records). This is nothing new. Social organizations (tribe/village/town/city) have put new pressures on us to adapt to.
Never mind caesarean; why do so many people need glasses? Why do so many get depressed in winter? It may all be ad-hoc sledgehammer adaptations to get (most of) us to settle down in villages and specialize. And use less calories per capita so the village thrives, even at the expense of the comfort of individuals.
Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'
#58Couldn't this be said about medicine in general?
Yes. The better medicine gets, the feebler we all become. This is a pity, but the alternative is worse[1]. [1] https://www.quora.com/Are-we-eliminating-natural-selection-b...
What I've realized is that sapiens is the first species to fall off of the evolution gradient. The more intellectual we become, the less dependent we will be on a random optimization function. We are scared about how AI would leap ahead of biology, don't neglect that we are leaping ahead of the rest of biology because we have biological intelligence.
We're just not making good use of our intelligence yet.
Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'
#59Flagging this story as the top comment is political. Please discuss the technicalities of this, not the ethics and politics.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13113094 and marked it off-topic.
Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> one sentence per paragraph, a concerning recent BBC trend 3 of your 5 paragraphs are a single sentence.
Yes, deliberately, and not all of them. And my post contains far fewer sentences than the article.
Funnily, those 3 paragraphs - because they were long sentences - were the easier to read on mobile. So there's one datapoint for ya.