No, not every death is natural selection. In fact, most of them aren't since the majority of deaths worldwide are either age related or age related illnesses.
Natural selection is random processes that weed out certain traits (biological, physical, social) before those have been passed on to the next generation. This typically means before the entity has had time to reproduce. If you have deaths after reproduction then the traits can still be passed down genetically. Though the longer post birth maturation period can still have an effect.
The deaths reported in the original article were all removing stupid people from the world; thanks to their actions the average level of the stupidity of humans has decreased slightly.
Their deaths should act as a warning to try and reduce further stupidity in the world; though some humans are especially bad at learning from other's mistakes.
Unless the person became infertile, why would death by old age not be considered part of natural selection? The people who die of old are are unable to have more children, because they are dead. They are also unable to further contribute to the fitness of their descendants.
A person's reproduction isn't just whether they did or not, but how much they did.
when people use language like "thanks to" when talking about evolution, I think it attaches too much of a value thing, such that people sort of smuggle in the idea that a thing that happens is good, by hiding it in the description saying that it happens.
Natural selection is, in its respectable form, about what is, not about what ought.
That's not to say one can't say related things about what ought, but I think one should be sure to clearly express when one is doing one versus when one is doing the other.
> In fact, most of them aren't since the majority of deaths worldwide are either age related or age related illnesses.
Have you ever heard of the grandmother hypothesis? Just because an organism is done directly reproducing its genes doesn't mean that it can't help its descendants successfully reproduce their genes.
Please do some reading on a topic before pontificating on it.
