June 01, 2006

Food For Thought

While stumbling clumsily out of my apartment this morning, trying simultaneously to balance my heavy briefcase, my Starbucks Frappuccino, this week's Economist, today's WSJ, and my house keys, a strange and startling thought came to mind: humans aren't evolving ... and doctors are to blame for it!

Now, the notion that humans aren't evolving due to wonderful life-sustaining effects of modern medicine is nothing new. In fact, I think I read an article about it in Science last summer. The problem with that article, however, is that it was written by scientists practicing science who have an obligation to Francis Bacon and his scientific method (what a load of crap that was!). They don't have the luxury of my own brand of preposterous pseudo-scientific postulations. Luckily, as readers of rohitsrealm.com, you do.

Now for everyone but the idiotically uninformed or the even more ridiculously heretical¹, the notion that modern medicine might restrict human evolution should be easy to follow. Evolution relies on the fact that those less equipped for a certain environment will procreate less successfully than those better equipped, consequently enacting, in the long term, changes or shifts in the molecular and physiological characteristics of the population at large. Modern medicine seeks to sustain life, essentially artificially maintaining less functional molecular and physiological traits in the population that might otherwise have been eliminated. Ok, fine. Why should you care?

Well, let's take a practical example: foods that will probably eventually kill you (e.g., red meat, anything with sugar, salt, MSG, or preservatives, etc.) but taste really good. Obviously, some people possess bodies (and consequently, genes) better equipped to handle the increased levels of cholesterol, sugar, and salt introduced by modern diets, and as such, evolutionary theory holds that these genes should proliferate in the population as less fit genes are eliminated. Nothing could be further from the truth though; instead, we have heart disease as the number one killer in industrialized countries and the advent of diabetes at a frightening rate. So, what happened? Darwin, where you at?

I'll tell you what happened. Doctors. That's what happened. Those damn Hippocratic oath-abiding quacks! They're ruining evolution for everyone! If you're on a diet and can't eat tasty food, you now know who to blame. Doctors. Why can't they just let those unfit genes (i.e., people) die! And while they're at it, they should make sure they don't proliferate (i.e., have any kids) either!

Now, apologists for the medical community and those self-righteous assholes who claim to have morals and ethics might take issue with my position, but what the hell do they know. Theirs is a culture of life. Evolution is all about the culture of death. My more scientifically-inclined readers might argue that even if we did enact my proposal -- no medical intervention -- the timescale of evolution is such that no one alive today (or even for the next 10,000 years), including yours truly, would probably reap any of the benefits of such an evolutionary trend. That's true, but I've got one word for all you haters: reincarnation.

Yes, my friends. Reincarnation. (I am, as it turns out, Indian.) Don't believe in it? Too bad. Guess you lose. Do believe in it? Well, I guess I'll see you in 10,000 years when we can eat all the fatty foods and drink all the sugary sodas we want and not worry about heart disease or diabetes.² Can anyone say BBQ?

¹ Yes, I went there.
² This statement is included for rhetorical purposes, not as a means of expressing my views on reincarnation. I take no position on the subject in this post.