I think the part that the other replies miss so far is that you can treat genes as a form of information transfer, and that we've taken information transfer through cultural means to a completely different level. And that this has two effects:

1: It removes the need for saving a lot of information in the gene.

I remember reading as a kid that in many ways mammals have a vastly simplified genome compared to amphibians. Why? Because we only need to encode enzymes that work for a small range of temperatures, whereas amphibians need to be much more adaptable. I think human culture could have a similar simplification effect on our genome.

2: Our evolution is no longer bound to our genes

We can adapt faster than genetic mutation, and you could consider that cultural adaptability a form evolvability as well. We're basically the first "general purpose" species!

3: Being a social species (a fundamental part of being cultural) encourages diversification

Imagine a sports event where there are five completely different types of individual sports being played. Now let's say peak performance is defined as how good you can get by spending 100% of your training time on it, and that the Pareto Principle applies in the sense that you can reach 80% of peak performance in one sport by spending 20% of your training time on it. Not an unrealistic scenario, right?

People also join in teams of ten. Now imagine two ways of how those teams are graded: the first sums up the average performance of the team per sport, the second sums up the best individual performance per sport.

In the first case, the optimal strategy is having allrounders. In the second case, the optimal strategy (assuming nobody gets injuries) is to have one specialist per sport.

What I'm saying is that being social species means our selection pressure leans towards the second situation: we collaborate, so any group is as best, as its best individual specialists working together. Meaning human groups have selection pressure towards specialisation, and thus diversification.

Of course those aids are part of the system. We would not have evolved to use tools if it was not advantageous. Hopefully it stays advantageous!

You seem to be talking about humans, not life in general. Human evolution still happens, but selection is not based on adaptability but on societal rules. And then we're going to start messing with our own genes and things will get more complicated.

It's the opposite, actually. With less selective pressure on good eyesight the selective pressure on having nice hair or a charming manner is more pronounced.

Same reason why all the fish at the bottom of the ocean are blind.

I know of only one species that wears glasses.

There are arguments both ways, but I disagree with others here - namely, that these, and therefore anything created by humanity, can be considered part of the system.

For example, you could then go on to say that medicines also form part of the system since we invented them. But then the conclusion of such a discussion would not involve our natural & unconscious attributes (in this case, our natural ability to fight of disease), which surely are the things that more define us (evolutionary) than individual acts (eg. Invent a medicine).

I say define us more, due to this:

If 2 babies are born identical, with identical potential for/intelligence, and 1 of them does not end up being nurtured etc, then even those 2 humans are completely different individuals at age 50, at age 0, it would be reasonable to say that they are evolutionary identical (however, it would open to debate if those two 50 year old individuals could be called evolutionary equal). The "act" in this case would be "nurturing that intelligence".

So in my opinion, there is such a thing as "peak humanity". The point at which we make life so easy for ourselves, that we start to erode the very evolutionary qualities that define us, evolutionary speaking. Case in point - me sitting typing at a computer 8hrs+ per day, rather than out hunting for food. This has had catastrophic negative effects on my health and who knows if any of that was passed down to my sons sons sons sons....I (and they) will never know because evolution works on scale we cannot fathom. And even if we could capture the delta, we have no means of measuring it.

I see things like glasses as making the fitness landscape smaller. This means there are less dimensions evolution has to solve for to produce better organisms.

(Or like you said, it's part of the system)

i have also thought about that, but i think they are perfectly valid parts of the system.

For example thanks to vaccines etc. we accelerated immunity drastically. Diseases also spread faster, but until now have been winning quite easily.

And we haven't really started to directly improve ourselves. If you look at this from the perspective of evolution (where 1000 years are not a lot) it seems we are very, very close to achieving this. I would guess this will accelerate Adaptation by some magnitudes.

I think the same applies to eating.

Since we can eat, we don't have to produce energy using sunlight like plants do.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?