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Nice job anthropomorphising evolution. Unfortunately that path leads to ruin.

Evolution has no foresight. Evolution can’t predict the future. Evolution is firmly rooted in the here and now. Doing something now (or not doing something now) because of a prediction of the future is something only humans can do, not evolution. Evolution knows no future.




Evolution knows no future, but it still makes sense to talk about evolution being prepared for a possible future. In particular, what ronaldx is saying is quite close to the accepted explanation for sexual reproduction. Sex produces, and maintains, a great deal of variety within the population that you won't see in an asexually reproducing one. It also imposes a very large penalty to the speed at which the population can grow (males, roughly half of any sexual population, cannot reproduce at all). It is felt that, historically, sexual populations have been so much more able to weather changing circumstances, because of the variability that their lifestyle ensures, that it must have outweighed the susbstantial reproductive penalty -- since sexual organisms have taken over virtually every ecological niche in the world. And this is for an adaptation the entire purpose of which is to guard the population against the future.

In summary: variability in the gene pool is a form of future protection, and one that has been specifically selected for. Be careful before you shout "fallacy!"


What I claim is that this iteration of humans have survived catastrophic black swan events in the past, and that catastrophic black swan events will happen in the future (in a very-long-term, i.e. evolutionary, timeframe).

Living humans don't have any reasonable concept of that, but evolution does have a memory of that[0].

I trust evolution to cover us for this type of future event better than I trust human prediction.

Being rooted in the here and now is something I would ascribe to humans before evolution: humans typically think as individuals on a time scale of 100 years - whereas if something has not been needed for 100 years, this does not illustrate that it is no longer of evolutionary importance.

[0] You can claim I am anthropomorphising here (but not in the earlier comment), but this is sometimes called an analogy, and is an accepted way of using the English language to describe concepts in a clear and simple way. Please ask any geneticist to translate this into evolutionary terminology if you remain unsure.




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