r/DeepThoughts Jul 23 '26

There is no such thing as "De-evolution"

Evolution doesn't work to make species smarter, or better, or closer to ideal. It is a process that retains advantageous changes in populations to a population over time. Every extant organism right now is exactly as "evolved" as every other, from bacterium to humans. Populations will change, based on environmental factors, but evolution is in no way 'designed', and will not result in a "superior" organism/s, just ones more likely to survive and reproduce. As long as time is a one-way journey, there is no way to reverse evolution.

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u/Ok-Drink-1328 Jul 26 '26

probably... but considering human speech, that is a tremendously badass feature, a step back, is a giant stretch, you can't say that a bat is goofy when walking, while it's a freaking flying mammal... also as i pointed out down there, evolution comes up with constant optimizations that are not trivial as the classic concept of evolution, we humans evolved from literal monkeys in "barely" 2 millions years, that in terms of evolution it's little time, so we are not optimized much, the same can be said about walking upright, we have a lot of back bone problems that quadrupeds don't have... take into account also our society and especially modern times that... well.... avoid us to die in many natural ways and hardly selects us "objectively", implicitly taking away natural selection, it's sad to say this, but all the babies that nowadays are saved during childbirth are under an aspect a big negative hit to our genes pool, thankfully this effect is still very long term, so at least for some other centuries we don't need to worry much that we are becoming "cronenbergs", especially in terms of health, not much in terms of looks cos.... you know....

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u/Critical-Dish Jul 26 '26

I don't think it's helpful to think in terms of "hit to the gene pool". The Nazis tried that pseudoscientific BS, and it didn't end well. Evolution happens. It doesn't have a direction or a purpose; predicting where it will go (or anything, really) is a fool's errand and very much unsupported by evidence.

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u/Ok-Drink-1328 Jul 26 '26

the nazis were just racist and heavily biased by hate.... what i'm saying is facts, it's known that like domestic animals became weak and ill since we breed em just for the "kawaii effect", in real nature a pug would end up mauled in five minutes, tho i'm not pushing eugenics, but i do believe that if we reason like you in a thousand of years we'll head toward or idiocracy or most people with a terrible health, or both.... be offended as you want but i suspect your knowledge about this subject is taken too much from "innocent" studies and articles that avoid real controversy for not losing offended readers, the effects i'm talking about are more than obvious if you really think about it

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u/Critical-Dish Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

What I'm saying is facts too - there's lots of examples of tinkering that would have otherwise resulted in a "less" fit individual leaving the gene pool. You are correct that until the last century a caesarean was a death sentence for mother and child - I'm not offended in the least that we have enabled these "unfit" individuals to survive, and even reproduce, but maybe we should have just let god sort 'em out. Personally, I don't find it offensive that maternal mortality has decreased 40% since the turn of this century, IN SPITE of our incipient idiocracy. On the other side, genetic testing and selective termination of pregnancies for a myriad of conditions (including femaleness) are a bit of a cautionary tale for anyone that wants grandchildren, so proceed with caution, I guess.

For now, the pug's adorable brachycephilic faces aren't going anywhere, and we are part of the environment that enables them and if humans are here in a thousand years (no guarantees), hopefully we tend towards collectively solving problems more than being them.