Originally posted by 2kitties
IF natural selection is valid, THEN is modern medicine the possible demise of human adaptation?
I don't think it's modern medicine as such that is the possible demise of human adaptation (I take it we mean evolution here, as in Darwin's "The Origin of Species" and the survival of the fittest), but it may be one of the precursors. I think the biggest problems are our natural human insecurities which leads to impatience, arrogance, greed and self centered thinking, making us the most aggressive animal on the planet. This will be our downfall, since we now have the tools that enable even individuals or very small groups of people to have a huge, negative impact on world society.

… or perhaps it will be precisely our remarkable ability to adapt that will be our downfall, we seem at this moment in history at least to be adapting to inferior conditions, both physically and mentally.

Modern medicine is just another technology which can be constructive or destructive. It is our technology in general which will ultimately be our undoing (or rather our misuse of it). I often speculate as to whether we would have a terrorist problem in the world today if it wasn't for the ease with which anybody nowadays can obtain extremely lethal weapons of destruction. Such people have always been around, but they have never before had the information or the tools to make any real impact.

The advances in modern medicine are driven by profit motives and not for the general good of the human race. That's the problem. I find it quite sick and disgusting that companies are falling over themselves in their rush to patent genes and DNA sequences for example, so that they can become rich at the expense of the rest of their kind. You shouldn't be allowed to patent nature!

Until we learn to work together towards one common goal, we are doomed to follow Darwin's logic, and I don't think that the "fittest" in his sense would be what I think would be fitting for an intelligent, sentient animal like humans beings.

Are we really "civilized"? We certainly don't seem to act that way. Any civilization we may have is a very, very thin veneer, and it doesn't take much before we revert to being mere animals again. This is easy to prove, just try reading a few international newspapers objectively and critically!