Faith writes:
I do have a bad habit of thinking outside the evolution box.
First of all, that's not a bad habit at all. The best ideas come from people thinking outside boxes. The important trick is to remember to check the box occasionally to see if you're still thinking outside the same one.
I'm trying to get away from the reproductive fitness definition to point out that any disease process that is allowed to accumulate in a population, simply because it escapes the selection processes and does not interfere with reproduction, in itself works against the idea of evolution.
When you're talking about evolution there's no getting away from reproductive fitness because that's what evolution is all about. But let's concede your point for a moment.
A first reaction to that could be to say that something that escapes selection and does not interfere with reproduction, does not work against evolution, nor for it, because evolution is nothing but reproduction with selection. So something that affects neither, must be neutral with regard to evolution.
But on second thought one could say that it might have some influence after all, when, for instance, the elder, non-reproductive members of the species are a factor in the survival of the young ones until they reproduce. In other words, if the grandparents are looking after their grandchildren while daddy is out gathering stuff and mummy is out hunting (let's say we're talking about a very modern population), then it might be a bad thing if they are too weak for the job, for whatever reason.
However, unfortunately for your argument, this does not mean that it works against
evolution. It may work against the survival of the species, but no one ever claimed that evolution is about the betterment or the preservation of species. Evolution is simply the process of change in living nature. If this change entails the extinction of a species, then so be it. It's simply the way things go.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.
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