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This book is written to examine changes in human ecology that will present basic challenges to human survival. Two items are primarily considered. These are the specific effect of medicine and the general effect of the massive changes in human ecology. There are important and fascinating implications illuminated by examination of these two effects.

Much of recent human progress has sometimes been defined as lengthening the average human life expectancy. The biggest cause of this has been advances in medicine, especially antibiotics. The importance of this change is illustrated by the fact that it used to be that as many as 3 out of 5 people died of disease before maturity. Disease is a general selective effect that will select on an any weak link in an individuals health.
While disease seems to be the most important single change in human ecology, it is certainly not the only change. For that matter, almost everything about human ecology has changed from the last ecology that humans were truly well adapted to. We don't eat what we used to eat. We don't get our food the same way we used to. We don't live where or how we used to. Our social structure and habits have changed. Our requirements for education are very different.

There is probably only one good way to deal with the dangerous long term results of removing the selective effects of disease. That is artificial selection. That method could probably solve most of the other physical problems that arise from the rest of the massive changes in human ecology.

Another problem will arise from the changes in human ecology and from using artificial selection to solve them, but it is more of a philosophical issue. We will need new and better moral systems. Luckily, humans have already developed many moral systems and methods. Using some of what is already currently available should provide most of what we will need to survive and thrive in a post tribal ecology. The solutions must be understood, but they should be quite workable and will be very natural to us.

Just about every aspect of human ecology has changed and is continuing to change. If this is primarily to examine how humans can develop a relatively long term stable ecology to survive in, features of ecologys that we have passed or will pass through on the way must be examined, such as terrace farming (an interesting, potentially stable ecology).
Ecology is defined as how a specie conducts its energetic and reproductive strategies. For various reasons, this paper includes beliefs as a basic element of human ecology. Currently, the only ecology that humans could be said to be well adapted to is the so called tribal hunter-gatherer ecology that we lived in and adapted to over the past six million years. In that ecology we developed survival strategies based on bipedalism, tool making and social abilities including cooperation, communication and intelligence, many of which were adaptations to cooperative hunting and warfare. These are topics that the Anthropologists debate endlessly and so are not closely examined here, but they are basic to this study.

The most obvious thing that propelled humans into a new ecology was the domestication of various animals and plants. A thorough examination of these changes would take a great deal of space and so is expanded upon in the 'history' section.
In our present ecology, many new selective effects and pressures have appeared and few selective effects have lessened or disappeared. Demands on social skills have increased. Our tool using potentials have greatly expanded. Only our need for hunting skills have reduced, and they are now often being used for different purposes. It is the communication and cooperative skills developed for hunting that allow humans to act together so powerfully as a team.

Here then is the first point of this chapter. Humans have inhabited cities for something near 10,000 years. All through that time, there have been two primary factors that dominate the challenge of survival. The first is social behaviors, described as cooperation, communication and intelligence. The second is disease. The importance of disease is that it becomes more of a problem as population goes up. There are just more people to spread it and there are just more people to catch something from. High density populations need better resistance to disease to survive.
The ecology that we are heading towards, disease allowing, is a civil or city ecology. This ecology will further demand greater social skills, including cooperation, communication and intelligence, as well as increased resistance to disease. It already demands a greater basic survival instinct as well.

C. D. Darlington - The Evolution of Man and Society

At this point, certain features of human nature and civil history must be examined. This part comes from the work of the British geneticist C.D. Darlington, who did a fantastic examination of human nature in the context of history. He described how tribes came together to create cities and how the tribes genetically came together to produce vibrant hybridized offspring that have propelled the development of human society.
His discussion of western culture describes how the tribes came together to create the first cities of Sumaria. The tribes lived together, but because of religion, they mostly stayed reproductively separate, as different occupational castes such as peasants, craftsmen, priests and scribes. That was the social structure of the first cities.
Then the Sumarians were basically conquered by the Semites, Sargon the Great, and a warrior ruling caste was added to the civil social structure, something that has basically remained until the present.
Later this civilization was conquered by a new Indo-European ruling class usually known as the Greeks, Eutustrians and Romans. This occupationally specialized caste based civilization expanded across the western world. It is important note that they encountered, conquered and absorbed the Celtic culture on the way. Darlington describes how the Celts added an important dynamic to the western civilization.
His book is a description of the ethnic and political development of the cities. The other thing that Darlington described was the effects of these tribes mixing. Normally, there were social institutions such as religion that kept the tribes from mixing, but there was a constant natural rate of mixing as well as the wholesale effects of slavery and war.
This mixing or hybridization of the tribes was of overwhelming importance to the development of western civilization and all world civilizations for that matter. Loosely speaking, it gave the abilities of both parents to their children. This is extremely important, because it is how people adapted to a hunter-gatherer ecology could adapt to this new agricultural and civil ecology.
Evolution is defined as a change in gene frequency. Usually it is described as a change resulting from a mutation appearing and becoming widespread. This then links the rate of evolution to the rate of mutation. It isn't so. If there was never another mutation in humans, there is so much diversity that there could be incredible changes in the overall frequency of the genes making up the human gene pool. In the time period since the domestication of plants and animals, there have been only a relatively few mutations, but in that same time period, there has been a terrific change in the distribution of human genetics. Small tribes have become huge and spread out all over the world. Many other tribes have vanished and many tribes have merged into one. Humans have changed and evolved greatly in recent history.

Medicine and Genetic Load

During the time of the cities and very often before the cities, the biggest selective effect on humans, was disease. Sometimes disease killed 60 percent of the population before they had children. That is a huge effect. Now with antibiotics and other modern medical practices, that effect is lowered such that it is no longer the primary selective effect on humans. There are other things that have changed what have always been important selective effects on humans, though not quite as much as medicine. Really, these are all parts of what was earlier described as massive changes in human ecology, but still, recent medical developments are the single biggest factor that has changed, in terms of human selection and evolution. Also, disease is a unique selective effect in that works as a general selective effect, removing weaknesses in the overall genome.
Human progress has often been measured in terms of the removal of things that cause death or natural selection, as it is called in biology. Unfortunately, it is natural selection that causes evolution and the lack of natural selection will cause a natural deterioration of human genes that is relatively the opposite of recent evolution. This deterioration will first effect the genes that have most recently been selected for, including those traits that have allowed humans to create civilization.
There are a few factors that promote natural genetic deterioration. Mutations are random events and so almost none of them are improvements. A mutation is when any part of a gene (the amino acids that make up the gene) changes randomly due to radiation, chemicals or any other natural or unnatural cause. Actually, being random events, most mutations are a bad thing that make the genes they occur in, either fail to function or function poorly. These are normally removed by natural selection. Some rare mutations are good and so are not selected against. They are actually selected for because of their beneficial effects. These are what allow species to evolve and survive.
When the genes in any individual have mutated such that they do not function properly, it is called genetic load. In humans, because we are such a diverse specie, there is another factor, besides mutations, that causes genetic load. This is when the genes undergo "recombination" before eggs or sperm are created in the parents. It is a problem of hybridization. When two species or in the case of humans, when two tribes intermingle or hybridize, the first generation of offspring, called the F1 generation in biology, tends to be healthier and stronger than the parents (called the P1 generation in biology). The first generation of children (F1) often seem to have the best traits of both parents and so are stronger than either parent. Unfortunately, the following generations (F2, F3, ....), are not as healthy as the first generation of children (F1). Not only that, they are often not as strong or as healthy as the Parents (P1) generation. This is because when recombination occurs, the genes don't fit together again perfectly.
Also at recombination, another event can happen. A sequence of amino acids that make up a gene or genome, can have a major breakage and make the gene completely fail to function right. That can happen even without hybridization and can really cause problems.
Current human practices are causing a great deal of genetic load while at the same time human progress is the process of removing the natural selective effects that would prevent individuals with broken genes from having children and passing on their genes. If the problem was just genetic load from random mutation, the problem would develop slowly. With genetic load also being created at recombination, it will become a problem sooner, much sooner as in the space of a few generations. I propose a solution that turns out to be very optimistic and elegant.

Artificial Selection and Morality

This is judged as moral because it is about healthy children, healthy families, healthy communities, healthy people and survival.
Basically, the problem is that humans work to remove selective effects and somehow a selective effect must be replaced. Allowing disease to run its natural course seems like a bad idea for two reasons. The first is that in the basic equation of human life in a technical society, is that children are so costly to raise in real and biological terms. The second reason is that no one wants to have their children die.
The only way to introduce a selective effect that can work and that will not be tragic or destroy the moral basis of the society, is to do pre-implantation artificial selection.
The idea is along the line of when parents decide to have children, they take number of eggs (perhaps 100) from the mother which are then fertilized by the father. From these, the best, healthiest, strongest or whatever you want to call it, are selected to be brought to term.
Survival is the ultimate conservatism. Changes in how we have survived to the present are inherently dangerous and should never be done without good reason, but recent changes in human ecology require some careful changes in our methods of survival.
In most people, the term Artificial Selection tends to bring to mind Nazis, eugenics and racism. In this case, I will describe it in terms of healthy children, healthy families, equality and a complete end to racism. I will further describe it as the only good chance for humans to survive into a bright future. I will also show that the alternative is horrifyingly stark.
This is when the issue becomes a question of morality. Of course then, one might want to ask what is morality. Well, most animals use instincts to form the behaviors that allow them to survive. Humans on the other hand, learn strategies and techniques that allow them to survive. These strategies and techniques are called moralities. The mark of a human is that they use moralities instead of just instincts to survive. Humans still use instincts and they are quite important, but without moralities, we are just animals and also wouldn't know how to survive in the present world.
Because it is difficult and takes a long time for human children to learn moralities, one of the basic strategies of human survival has been the institution of the family to teach children the moralities that worked for the parents. It is sort of a circular logic. If it didn't work for the parents, they don't teach it to the children, but then, that is how evolution works. It is about survival of the survivors.
This essay is meant to be a summary of a very long complicated analysis of a lot of things related to how humans can survive the recent and ongoing changes in human ecology. As a summary, almost all discussion and argument have been skipped over here so as to present the important ideas and concepts. Longer analysis and discussion are available in the verbose notes elsewhere (on the web site). In the case of artificial selection, some of the reasoning and argument must be presented here. It turns out that there are far more implications than might be initially expected.
The first issue that must be addressed is how does the selection get made about which of the fertilized embryos gets to grow. The best embryos are generally the ones that have the most and best traits of both parents. It can be more complicated than that for a lot of reasons, including that not all traits will go together best or the parents might be looking at a multi-generation strategy, but in most simple cases, the best (you can even call it superior) embryos are the ones that have the most traits that the parents value in themselves and their mates, without observable breakages. In view of present technology, the genes of an embryo can not be examined before the embryo is at the gastrula stage of a few hundred cells, when some cells are sloughed off. Before this, it is likely that the embryo could be harmed. Artificial wombs present an important issue discussed elsewhere.
The second issue to address is always a question of why do artificial selection at all? Even aside from the reasons caused by the changes in the ecology, I usually point out that that is a question asked by healthy intelligent people. A person with inheritable diabetes, heart disease, mental problems etc., knows the answer to that question.
There are at least three views of the potentials of artificial selection that must be examined. These are selection against broken or bad genes. Selection for good genes and selection for the hybrid. In ways, issues 2 and 3, are related.

1. Reduction of broken or bad genes
There are two ways of looking at what the genes of an embryo indicate about the traits it has inherited from the parents. One way is too look at the individual amino acid sequences and figure out what they mean. Currently this is not technologically possible and may not be for a long time, if ever. There are other ways to look at genes that are much more feasible and are techniques that are already used, though they will certainly need to be refined. These methods are called banding patterns and fingerprinting. They look at the groups of amino acids as they fit together in genes. It is more a matter of looking at traits or genes, than it is looking at the sequences that make up the genes. This is good because this is the level of analysis needed to see the effects of recombination, if not individual mutations.
Examining the genes (of the parents and the embryo) at that level would give information about what traits the embryo had inherited from both parents and if there were any noticeable breakages of the genes as they were inherited from the parents. It will take far more than we know now, but before long we could know what genes lead to what developments in the child. Then if a parent carried a hereditary weakness, if that parent's gene was recognizable at that place in the embryo, it would indicate that the child would inherit that weakness. Contra wise, if the gene from the healthy parent appeared at that particular location, it would mean that a child would not inherit the weakness.

2. Increase of Health, Beauty and Brains
All three of these views of artificial selection actually overlap some. Do one and by default, to some degree, you are doing the rest.
I once read a book that spoke of a religious leader that went anonymously among the common people and asked "what do you want". The answer was that "I want my son to be taller than me". While that is a very limited thought, its simplicity reflects a profound truth.
The first case examined in looking at artificial selection was about removing broken traits, in-effective traits or traits that had a known bad effect. This second view is about increasing the frequency of genes that are known to make for beneficial (or superior) traits. Loosely speaking, these are referred to as health, beauty and brains.
The meaning of these are not necessarily obvious. There are many forms of beauty. There is facial beauty, skin tone, a good figure and other forms of physical beauty. There are other forms such as a beautiful singing voice or gracefulness. Some interesting recent research suggests that facial beauty is related to a wide mix of genes. If so, it is an additive effect that would be enhanced by hybridization.
The meaning of health can be many things. It can be strength, endurance, resistance to disease, healing ability, resistance to cold or heat, digestion, resistance to cancers, hearing, visual acuity and many other things.
The meaning of brains is open to even more meanings. It includes many kinds of intelligence, memory, spatial analysis, patience and many forms of mental stability. It also surely includes many things that we don't understand presently.
In many cases, there will be more than one form of a trait that would be considered superior. Other times, there will be trade offs. The situation will be as variable as there are individuals, but it should be possible for children to be consistently more than their parents.
It becomes a question of what do you respect the most about yourself or your mate? Wouldn't you want to insure that your children inherited it? In natural situations, there is no guarantee that they will, but with artificial selection you might be able to.

3. Hybridization
The work of C. D. Darlington shows that the progress of civilization has mirrored the progress of human genetic potentials. Further, those potentials mostly have arisen as a result of hybridization between the tribes. There are social structures like religion, caste and class that have inhibited hybridization, but it occurs naturally and has been promoted by war and slavery. Hybridization leads to other problems though, but these have always been removed by natural selection, leaving the hybrids that were stronger and whose genetics were stable. Another potential of artificial selection would be to allow for selection for stable hybridization.
This would allow further improvement of what humans are and allow us to be better adapted to the coming ecologies that we are creating. Really, humans are adapted most to an ecology that existed before cities, when we lived by hunting, gathering and scavenging. We are still far from adapted to even the present ecology, let alone what is coming.
Another issue related to this is that humans are very tribal and act like it. One facet of this is racism. There are reasons that the tribes haven't mixed. In a natural situation, mixing between tribes meant losing some of the traits of both. This is part of the reason tribes tend not to mix. To be able to artificially select for stable hybrids would remove most of the reasons for this. More than that, it would sort of reverse the situation. Instead if artificial selection was used, the traits of both tribes of the parents could be combined in the children. It would make people look at other races or tribes in a different way. The question would be "what traits do you have that I could add to mine". Racism would become meaningless to most people for good reason.
While this is certainly eugenics, it is not based on the racism and jingoism that has all too often been the basis of some previous concepts of eugenics. There is no person that has no superior genes. Genes that work are the result of billions of years of evolution and if you exist, it means your ancestors never lost at the biological game. Artificial selection used this way would make for healthy families and healthy children. Some people are not going to want to do it. They may be healthy enough not to need to, but their children may decide otherwise. There are other considerations such as if almost everyone is extremely healthy, it might be that the handicapped are far less common and so might be more discriminated against. I think we can deal with problems like that.
Sure there are ways to abuse it, but they are old ideas. There are also going to be stupid things done by people with strange ideas of what is superior, primarily militarists, but silly ideas are not likely to last much more than a generation.
Various forms of gene therapy and genetic manipulation will also be developed as well that will be able to effect human genetics for the better, but that effect will be at a completely different level. Just as selective breeding is at a different level than artificial selection at the chromosomal level, gene therapy too operates at a different level.

The Future Human Ecology
The next stable ecology will differ from the "hunter/gatherer" ecology in many ways. Instead of our energy resources coming from wild plant and animal crops, our resources will be supplied from whatever replaces the fossil fuels that we currently use. Resources will be completely dependant on our energy supply. Reproduction will change from a quantity strategy to a quality strategy. At the same time, while the basis of our ecology changes, some things will stay the same such as our social system of family and community that is how we raise children. Where the social system will change is that tribalism will most likely disappear. This will be part of the biggest ecological change of all, concious control of human genetics and controlled intentional hybridization. In ways, disease will remain a qualitatively similar problem, but far fewer women will die in childbirth.

Next Chapter: Genetics and Artificial Selection

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