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Comment by sorokod | Hacker News Reader

Place your faith in natural selection.

In addition to being ugly, this sentiment is pretty misguided. The selection pressure is far too mild to have any evolutionary impact.

To whit: covid selects primarily against individuals beyond their reproductive age, selects far too small of the population (unless we see these deaths continue for decades), and is only mildly selecting for anti mask populations.

Most importantly, being anti-mask can't be attributed to a clear genetic variable (although I suppose there might be some very weak correlation), and natural selection takes way, way longer than a human lifetime to create noticeable results anyway. Not even getting into the fact that there's much more to evolution than natural selection. It actually scares me that supposedly "pro-science" people have such simplified views about it.

Note that the timescale for seeing results is related to the selection pressure. You can see very fast results (e.g. a single or few generations) if the pressure is extraordinary.

AFAIK this only happens via guided intervention (see humans selective breeding of crops, dogs, foxes, etc)

Anyone who treats science as a religion ends up with a pretty terrifying morality.

You can remove science from that statement and it'll still be true. Whoever derives their morality from religion will at times behave pretty abhorrently.

Thankfully nowadays even people claiming they do so often actually don't. I.e homosexuality is amoral according to the texts, but society moved on for the most part.

amoral =/= immoral

You can remove religion and morality from that statement and it'll still be true.

People will at times behave pretty abhorrently.

Stalin wasn't religious, but he still initiated a gigantic slaughter of his own countrymen. Ditto Mao.

Just trying to make the point that being horrible correlates with being human, not being religious.

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