Fejal, no offence intended, but the ideas about the practical and ethical implications of evolution and 'survival of the fittest', that you've absorbed and passed on here, are total rubbish, as well as being offensive and outdated, and here are a few reasons why...
- Biodiversity is the important factor for the long-term survival prospects of a species as a whole. Narrow focus risks extinction in the face of a changed environment. There's just no predicting in advance what will be necessary for survival. It's perfectly feasible that the next plague could wipe out everybody except those who happen to have the means to respond to it, and those who seem to be 'the fittest' right now might be completely exposed to some new threat. Your arguments are based on the assumption that the future environment will present the same kind of challenges as the current and past environment, and the assumption that there is one single and unchanging measure of evolutionary fitness - both assumptions are clearly false.
- You focus exclusively on the 'ugly', 'retarded' and physically sick as if physical health were the sole criteria for evolutionary success or failure. Yet it is clear that everything we are is a product of evolutionary processes - and that includes aspects of us like intelligence, imagination, compassion, morality, social skills, etc etc etc. All of the things that we are are the product of evolutionary processes, and were shaped by them - and so to think about evolution purely in terms of physical beauty will lead you down hopeless blind alleys. Professor Stephen Hawking is still worth having around, don't you think? He makes a pretty good contribution to society despite his immense physical challenges, wouldn't you say?
- It is now suspected that viruses and retroviruses in particular may be a crucial factor that drives evolution- and not just by wiping out those that can't cope with them (the simplistic old theory) but by actually changing and integrating with the organisms that they infect.This idea may seem Lamarckian to you, but the discovery of retroviral RNA was a heretical but true revolution.The simplistic conception of Darwinism has tended to focus on factors in the macro environment, but factors in the micro environment are of course at least as important, and have tended to be underestimated just because we can't see them with our eyes. Retroviruses in particular demonstrate that today's viruses will in the future become integrated into our genome and will become part of us. Biologically, it may well be that everything we are made up of originally started out as a challenge to an organism that invaded it and, eventually, became integrated into the ecosystem of the organism.
- Following on from the previous point: consider the probability that any of the unknown infection(s) that are believed by some to cause our illness (and it's of course completely unproven and widely disputed that infection is the underlying factor in ME/CFS) are of a type that is now out in the wild, spreading and mutating, and impossible to eradicate - a fact of human life that everyone may have to deal with at some point in the future. Those who have not yet got sick from such viruses may or may not have been exposed to them. They may or may not have some inherent strength that has protected them so far - perhaps they just haven't encountered the wrong combination of very specific circumstances to get sick yet. If this is the case, then far from being evolutionarily vulnerable, in 2 or 3 generations' time our descendants might actually have a head start! Their bodies may be better adapted to coping with the types of evolutionary challenges that are growing in importance, whereas those who have no history of such adaptation could get wiped out by a new superbug to which they have no learned resistance. Evolution happens over generations: it's our descendants' fitness to our descendants' environment that will determine their suvival or otherwise.
- We may be infected, we may be sick, but we have not died from that. Until we do die or become unable to reproduce, evolution has not finished with us yet. Our ability to reproduce would seem to give us some form of licence to do so. Only if and when the world decides to do away with us will that licence be withdrawn - so it's logical that we should fight against grotesque and half-baked ideas about sterilisation if we value life at all.
- Your assertions that nobody cares about the sick and ugly and disabled are palpably false - that may be true in your immediate environment but it certainly isn't in mine, so it is not a universal truth. Similarly your assumption that happiness in life depends only on material success, wealth, physical fitness etc. is proved false by experience: that may be true for you, so far, but it isn't at all true for everyone. If this were true, then why would so many celebrities suffer from alcoholism, depression, and drug dependence, and lead empty, lonely and unsatisfying lives? And why are so many disabled people brimming with optimism and happiness? Perhaps you just haven't hung around the right people long enough and in the right way to find this out, but I have found throughout my life that the greatest sources of happiness lie not in superficial material success, but in the warmth and love and sharing of compassionate human beings. And I've found that the deepest experience of those things is to be found amongst those communities facing the greatest challenges, in the deepest poverty and suffering, where survival is dependent on sharing - on the social aspects of our species. Perhaps when the sort of shit you are predicting for the future hits the fan, the people at the greatest risk will be those who are outside the wider group of humanity - those who are heartless and isolated and despised and who may be rejected by the communities of survival. The narrative that one needs to be rich and beautiful in order to be happy is pushed on us through the mass media all day long - in an attempt to sell us their wares - but it is a lie and an illusion, and it conceals the best things in life.
- Ultimately the question seems to boil down to: "Is a sick or disabled life worth living?". Is there any value in such a life at all? When we moan and groan that our lives are unbearable and are not worth living, we likely believe it at the time but our continued existence proves us wrong. The very fact that we continue to exist, even if some of us may sometimes think or talk about suicide, proves that we have decided that, on balance, it's worth sticking around. So we've answered our own question: despite all the suffering, despite all the feelings of hopelessness, on balance we continue to decide that it is better than nothing, and there is some hope. If someone makes that decision for themselves - and even so strongly that they are prepared to live on and bring up a child - then they take on the responsibiity to make that decision to live on behalf of their offspring - just as anybody must when they decide to bring a life into the world and to care for it as best they can. Such decisions are therefore by definition the individual's to make, and evolutionary theory doesn't give anybody any right to take such decisions for others as if they could calculate and know what the future may hold.
- Medical advances have rendered previously incurable and debilitating conditions treatable. Isn't that the whole point of medicine and science? With the accelerating pace of medical and scientific advances, there's every reason to hope that the biological realities that define our lives today will be changed completely within the next century. Stem cell research holds the prospect of "turning back the biological clock" and restoring our bodies to their prime. Research aimed at achieving "biological immortality" is a growing and serious science. If the problems of human biology can be conquered in the future with the help of ever-more-powerful supercomputing (did you read about The Singularity as I suggested?) then the environment in which we evolve may be very different in the future - and that may be a step-change as big as the one that made intelligence the most important factor for survival rather than brute strength.
The way you look at these questions is based on a crude and unquestioning model of the implications of evolutionary theory, and it seems to me it is probably also based on your own negative feelings about your personal situation. Your fatalistic assessment of the prognosis for ME/CFS sufferers and for the future of the planet is a guess about the future, and the determining factor in that guess is your own emotional state: you feel a sense of despair and you struggle to find hope. But Life and Hope are inextricably linked; perhaps they are even identical, because a continued decision to live implies the absence of total hopelessness, and the existence of hope requires life. So if to live is to hope, then the optimistic decision of a couple to bring a life into the world is by definition a justification for that decision: they have sufficient hope, sufficient optimism, to make the decision, and sufficient life in them to give the child what it needs to live and to have the opportunity to hope itself.
I am very sorry that you feel such hopelessness and despair. Intractable and debilitating pain can rob us of the joy of living, and chronic unrecognised pain, combined with neglect from authority, wears down our reserves of hope over the years. Nobody here can fail to understand that. But this is Phoenix Rising: we are all about hope here: we believe that greater knowledge and understanding can and will transform our lives, and we believe that by sharing information and experiences here, and by hoping together that things can be different, and working together to make it so, we can help to bring about that individual and collective transformation more quickly.
You're still here in this community - and on this very thread - because we have compassion for your pain and suffering, and because we all want to help share that hope with you. And presumably you're still here because you are still searching desperately for that hope, and some part of you hopes you can find it here. I really hope you can, because beliefs like those you've expressed here are both a product of hopelessness and a cause of it, and as such they are dangerous infections indeed.
