what will the ideal human body be like? - eviltoast

what would a realistic ideal human body be like, would it be resistant to cancer, resistant to autoimmune dieases, no ageging etc.

  • SJ0@lemmy.fbxl.net
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    1 year ago

    I think the concept of an ideal may be flawed. What is ideal changes based on what the current situation is.

    That goes for the ideal human body as well as the ideal human philosophy. We need to evolve constantly to fit with our current situation.

    People get fat because famines killed people a lot. People have sickle cell anemia because sickle cell traits protect against malaria which killed people a lot. A lot of cancers are caused by mechanisms that protect against things that kill people a lot. Different personality traits that look suboptimal exist because those strategies were successful over time. Yeah these traits look bad when that situation doesn’t exist, but they’re much more likely to help in the aggregate than to hurt particularly with stuff like cancers which tend to kick in after an individual has reproduced so don’t have as much of an evolutionary impact.

    A lot of the same goes for philosophies – people tend to follow what works, and what works at one time doesn’t work all the time – ask gen z as they’re given advice by boomers.

    All this is one good reason to be wary of genetic engineering. We’ll get rid of all the “bad traits” and be wiped out because some of them were there for good reasons we don’t understand.