US Income Inequality Higher Than Ancient Rome

[DrKvothe]

Originally Posted by Elements [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

In all likelihood some catastrophic disaster will probably result in a global food shortage in the not to distant future leaving many athletic/fit individuals with high metabolisms at a disadvantage, and the ones with an extra 300 pounds of energy reserves and the metabolic ability to make better use of their caloric intake at an advantage.

What's interesting is how some healthcare companies think. Assuming no reproductive intervention, a company that provides a treatment that allows an individual to reproduce (when they otherwise would have died, removing their genome from the subsequent generation) can look forward to more individuals that will need to use their product in the subsequent generation. This is why it is rare to see a for profit organization spending research dollars on cures rather than treatments. Treatments are long-term cash cows.

But how can public dollars/insurance afford to keep treating everyone generation after generation as we further pollute our gene pool?

An important point to make is that it's impossible to predict what sort of strong selective pressures we might face, and therefore every phenotype has some potential value. The most likely threat is probably an omni-drug resistant bacteria, and the only solution will be specific molecular phenotypes that provide immunity. It's impossible to predict the visible phenotype that corresponds to that molecular structure.

Your idea that drug companies are selectively breeding customers has little merit. First, any disease that predominantly kills people beyond the age of 40 has little effect on fitness, and that's pretty much every lethal disease that drug companies care about. Second, drug companies don't reap the benefits of a next generation of customers because patents don't last that long. Third, 'cures' to noncommunicable diseases can be extremely lucrative. All cancer 'treatments' ARE 'cures' that attempt to kill the cancer, ending the threat of the disease. It's just really, really difficult to do.

We're not 'polluting our gene pool'. We're diversifying it, and that is an essential strategy to avoid extinction. There's very strong evidence that the health problems in our country aren't genetic. For one, the same health problems begin to appear in areas of the world that are introduced to our processed food.