Genes to fight for

Nature is ruthless and dispassionate, only the strongest and fittest get to live to breed another day. The weak, the sickly, those not best suited to the environmental conditions of the day, if they are not abandon by their hard pressed parents, will most likely fall by the wayside. Pushed aside by their pier group who are stronger and more suited.

What genes we get to inherit is a lottery, a random cut and shuffle, a bit from her and bit from him and perhaps some oddity due to a mistranslation. That is what you are dealt. Whether or how you survive depends on this initial hand dealt, how you manage to fend off predators, find sufficient to eat and win out on the right to breed.

Then along comes religion and science. Now every born person must be spared and all of our skills and resources are funnelled into saving this soul for as long as humanly possible. No matter the underlying cause or defect that put their life in jeopardy in the first place. In all humanity, it is everyones entitlement, it is their birthright to have a chance to survive, succeed and to reproduce. When societies were ravaged by disease, famine or more often war, it was a imperative that became translated into a moral code, preserve all life at all costs.

Natures way ensured only the carriers of the strongest and fittest gene mix were likely to reproduce and thus pass on their award winning combination of genes to the next lottery drum draw. Our moralistic intervention now ensures all gene combinations, the weak and flawed are preserved together with the strong and resilient, both equally contributing to the next generation. There is no way left to discard those gene combinations that are weak, self-destructive and or reduce our fitness to survive natures changing patterns.

Worse still, through economic success and science our populations now exceed the worlds capacity to sustain an equilibrium. To support all of those now born and grant them a right to breed requires that the worlds resources will diminish below their natural replacement level. We could argue the pros and cons on this, but let us just settle on this one aspect. Current world population, if they only bred at a replacement level, would still be challenged to find sufficient resources to sustain them. But the population currently will increase well beyond mere replacement levels. We just have too many surviving people for the good of the world we inhabit. Unlike any other time in our history we can afford to be relaxed or conservative about the need to procreate.

A weak gene, take for example colour blindness, can propagate through the male population at fast rate. We are beginning to discover a number of such genetically related defects which threaten the longevity of us as a people. The much greater mixing up of the gene pool has many advantages, spreading good strong gene characteristics around. But as we spread the strong we are also spreading the weak and defective gene. There is no weak gene kill off option left within our kingdom. There is a real risk that we will continue to weaken our gene pool putting our long term survival in jeopardy. There is of course no god standard of what constitutes a good strong gene. Woe betides us if we go back over the Aryan dream again. That should not stop us thinking about the issues of the propagation of self-evidently harmful destructive genes. As a first step we should short-list gene traits that are set to spread rapidly and quantify their harmful long term effects. Whilst we might adapt and be content to live with wide-spread colour blindness we would not respond the same way to sickle cell disease.

Our continued success as people ultimately depends on the strength of our gene pool and its vitality to adapt to the extremes that our over-population is already forcing on our environment. We as a people are going to have to devise ways to ensure certain weak genes do not get the chance to propagate, even if that is at the cost that certain individuals do not automatically get the right to reproduce.