Alright, so Ive got a bit of a question regarding futuristic societies for settings.
So, as we all know, medicine and treatment has increased in quality quite a bit even just over the past few decades. The obvious side affects, longer lifespan, diseases becoming less lethal, etc. are pretty obvious, but I'm kind of curious about a different effect. Namely, the "survival of the fittest" effect. Thanks to advances in medicine, people who would normally die off before reproducing are now living long enough to do so, passing along their genetic traits along the way. Now, I'm no biologist yet, but wouldnt this mean that as society advanced, you would see a sharp increase in less desirable traits over time? For example, bad eyesight, genetic disposition towards obesity, bad hearts, mental disorders, odds of getting cancer, the list goes on and on.
The question I have, is would it be possible that the breeding of flaws (survival of the weakest, if you will) will outpace the advances in modern medicine? That at a certain point, genetic flaws and disorders would be so common that they simply overwhelm our ability to treat them? Obviously we're talking hundreds of years down the road here, but I feel it would be an interesting theory to base a setting on. Given that first world countries are the most likely to have proper medicine, and be the first to explore the stars, I feel like itd be very possible, especially if some sort of "dark age" cut off colonies from the more varied genetics of earth.
Would these colonies, without the advanced resources they need to keep their genetic shitshow in check, be forced to resort to more extreme measures to survive? Say for example, genetic experimentation and manipulation, or more horrifying, abandoning the flesh to replace it with the machine? Or worse, would they be forced to live with what they were dealt, being a pale mockery of mankind used to be, twisted by maladies and madnesses beyond counting?