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Comment by johnnymorgan | Hacker News Reader

Love how you framed this, also a parent with a kid with issues.

All issues are rising, the whole 'we are just smarter now' is hubris, we really are not.

The idea that the rates of disease increase when screening increases is widely known. Any epidemiologist who tries and analyze data and model disease trends accounts for a number of factors that can impact prevalence - screening rate, screening accuracy, etc.

The number of people with a disease can stay static, but the number of diagnoses can increase dramatically with widespread screening and accurate tests.

Moreover it’s a vicious (virtuous) cycle. To get better funding to research a specific disease experts will play up how important their research is by playing up the severity, the “increasingness” of the thing.

With funding secure you can now roll out more research studies that tell practitioners all about the disease and how it’s “increasingly important”. Now doctors will test more patients for the disease, maybe over diagnose it too. And so and so forth.

Humans are flawed. Humans make research. We should be more skeptical about supposedly “established” science.

absolutely, technology changes but people don't. It is precisely because of technology that we aren't changing, that is its entire point.

Wait, are you saying humans would be evolving if not for technology? Interesting take...

Always evolving, but technology has surely influenced natural selection - a lot of illnesses/conditions that might have killed people prior to them reproducing are no longer factors in that regard

We're altering the environment rapidly. Environment has a large influence on gene expression. Not a biologist but that is more likely the reason.

pretty much - we don't adapt our form to our environment, rather when a problem arises we develop a technology that removes the discomfort we feel, which would otherwise act as an adaptation driving pressure. We develop our tech such that any segment can be readily learned as an isolated component, and as such our memory isn't under pressure to improve. We outsource memory to digital storage, and so there is even an allowance for memory to shrink.

Overall, all our tech looks at helping us not have to change, grow, or adapt. We want to live a life of comfort but comfort means no pressure and no pressure means no adaptation reinforcement of advantageous mutations, since what is most advantageous is being average in every way.

The notion that “we don't adapt”, though, is really a euphemism for “people, who otherwise might not, are surviving to reproduce and are therefore not selected out”. But the truth is that death is still inevitable and people are still being selected out, and we are still, therefore adapting. The only thing that has changed is what environment we are being selected for: Earth in the Anthropocene.

The technology-caused changes of environment are so recent that we wouldn't have had adapted to them no matter what. Adaptation takes a long time, the last significant adaptation we've had is lactose tolerance (lactase persistence mutation) which was unusually fast to spread and took only a few thousand years to do so. A few centuries is so small time (for human generations - it's different for bacteria or insects) that we should expect literally zero adaptation even if the "pressure to improve" would be the same.

This sounds more logical. We change the environment way too fast so that we become worse adapted to the new, human-modified, environment as a result

i mean yeah i knew a bunch of weak sickly kids growing up who wouldnt've survived natural selection. instead they will go on to breed more scrawny allergy ridden asthmatics

i wonder how this carries over to mental stuff. like autists or psychopaths might have gotten forced out of society a few hundred years ago so they couldn't reproduce as much, might explain why the former is so much more common? idk

There is absolutely no reason to think psychopaths were excluded from society. Chances are, they were very successful and run even more unchecked then now.

Cultures had good psychopath tests then too, like this is where dares originate from. You could get excluded quickly. After religion and tech arrived I think on balance it's more comfortable for them.

We are also changing because of technology.

The food we eat, the drugs we get, the lifestyles we have, the air we breath- are all different and make us different people than prehistoric humans.

For better and for worse.

Given that fentanyl overdoses are now the leading cause of unintentional death for young people in the USA, if that trend continues then we should expect to see higher average levels of opioid resistance evolve over the next few generations.

I also expect to see hormonal birth control become less effective over many generations. Those for which birth control fails are likely to have more children.

Of course, all of us here will be long dead before any exploration pressure exerted by those drugs becomes apparent at a population level.

It's an amusing thought, but I don't understand how you can apply such a darwinian rulebook here unless you conflate behavioral traits with bio-molecular pathways. Do you think abstinence is part of opioid resistance, or that forgetting to take pills is part of hormone resistance?

Most people _not_ dying of fentanyl overdoses are not taking them in the first place, rather than surviving exposures due to sturdier nervous systems. I think a normal interpretation of the phrase "opioid resistance" would mean that their systems can tolerate a higher dosage.

Conversely, most birth control failures are thought to be behavioral differences. I.e. whether the user is aware that protection may be absent due to missed doses or other scenarios called out in the instructions.

Maybe these two forces will cancel out since one selects for more discipline and the other for less...

> Do you think abstinence is part of opioid resistance, or that forgetting to take pills is part of hormone resistance?

Forgetting to take pills is already part of the measured effectiveness of hormonal birth control. It's included in the official statistics.

As it should be, obviously. Not taking pills is the easiest and most important way to resist their effects.

I know. I wouldn't describe that as evolving resistance to hormonal pills though...

But that's exactly what it is. Over time, willingness to take the pills, and ability to follow through on intent to take the pills, will be bred out of the population.

Only if Pills were the only birth control technic.

I rather hear from more and more people, how they have to struggle reproduce at all.

> Only if Pills were the only birth control techni[que].

Absolutely not. As long as they're in use, the pressure is there to make them less effective.

No, that far overestimates the speed and impact of natural selection.

Having <1% of population die before breeding because of some factor (no matter if drug overdoses or something else) is not a sufficiently big pressure to nudge towards an opioid resistance in just a few generations; if there today were some meaningful sub-population with such a resistance, an effect so tiny as the current overdose deaths might result in that resistance spreading over hundreds or thousands of generations; it would take a few more orders of magnitude more overdose deaths to have an effect in just a few generations. Similarly for hormonal birth control, especially if it fails, it has an above-average likelihood of being aborted.

I mean, all these things can happen, but not after we're dead, but at the time scale of year 3000+ by which time I'd expect that medical technology would allow us to control these genes directly, making the direction of natural selection irrelevant.

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