Risk

I have repeatedly talked about the importance and danger that is involved in some aspects of artificial selection in terms of the need for balance. Too much or too little of some traits will certainly lead to disaster. Often I have used the example of aggressiveness to illustrate this. Too little or too much and there are problems.

Perhaps a better example would be Risk. Human nature includes risk taking behavior, whether it is a teenager on a motorcycle or a businessman making a calculated judgement. How we decide what to do has a strong genetic component.

It should be easy to see that this presents a great potential hazard. If this behavior loses its natural balance, it will not serve survival and may actually endanger it.

If you could quantify the level of natural risk taking of the human race and call that the baseline of zero, it seems unlikely that that level would change by any large percentage without it being a huge risk to survival. Carelessly changing this level using artificial selection could be extremely dangerous. This applies to a number of other traits in humans that exist in an ongoing balance.

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