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Mariellyssa Wenk's picture

what I should have written my paper about

This past weekend I was reading James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and it struck me how much humans are influencing the course of evolution. Nearly every other species, because of a lack of technological or scientific advancement, rely solely on the “circle of life.” With other species, nature still takes it course. The diseased, impaired, predisposed or genetically different die off. This is nature’s way of weeding illness out of future lineages. Naturally, if an organism has a disease, it will die early and therefore not succeed in producing offspring, eliminating the defective genes from passing on. People on the other hand have found ways to survive these diseases, to heal drug addictions, and to keep those genes passing on from generation to generation. I know it sounds rather crude and unethical to say, “let them die,” but from the perspective of a scientist looking merely at the course of evolution, it makes more sense to let the diseased die. Could people potentionally be messing with the entire human population by keeping alive and reproducing, the naturally unfit? 

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