Am I correct in my judgment that the human body requires a lot of unusual high maintenance...

Am I correct in my judgment that the human body requires a lot of unusual high maintenance? Compared to most if not all species on this planet?
Acne, crooked teeth that need braces, too oily or too dry skin, dandruff, hair loss, etc.. Do animals even get problems like this? Or are genetic failures like that relentless weeded out in the animal kingdom, meanwhile we get this shit because our environment, our civilizations, basically let everyone survive?

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nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/03/how-i-discovered-i-have-the-brain-of-a-psychopath
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

>Or are genetic failures like that relentless weeded out in the animal kingdom, meanwhile we get this shit because our environment, our civilizations, basically let everyone survive?
yes.

we haven't lived civilized lifestyles long enough to claim that our evolution isn't valid.

This pretty much. Thanks to civilisation, industrialisation and medicine we've sort of become detached from natural selection.

We've become smart enough to provide for most rather than carry on with the strongest. And so the weak carry on as well. Whether you think that's a good or bad thing is up to you.

Not to say that natural selection doesn't still occur though.

>crooked teeth that need braces

I had a conversation with my oral hygienist about this once- how early humans dealt with dental problems. She said that early human diet eliminated a lot of those problems, including crooked teeth. Apparently, eating lots of hard foods, like nuts or... I dunno, fuckin' rat bones, strengthens whatever it is that anchors teeth, and prevents them from drifting. These days, our diet tends to be softer, cooked foods that don't work our teeth as much.

All of those are just about beauty

This is debatable. We provide for the weak but they still don't reproduce on a significant scale. Evolution is still very much going.

Yes OP, animals do have similar problems. Chimps go bald. The sorts of problems you listed are largely irrelevant to survival though. You have acne, the next guys lungs haven't developed. We are efficient for our level of complexity.

agree with this, but that "natural selection" would be defined differently, since it's not really environmental pressure that defines which genes are passed on.

We are more selected against genetically now than environmentally is my point.

>Veeky Forums has never seen a cat or bird preen itself for hours on end

preening is a behavior associated with fitness. The more an animal preens, the more they are selected for, generally speaking. It is similar with extravagant dancing.

I've read that diet could be a culprit. Carnivores over at plebbit describe great health benefits.

animals have this too, but they usually have other things to worry about, like staying alive

How does acne, crooked teeth, oily/dry skin, dandruff, and hair loss impede survival?

Crooked teeth increase likelihood of tooth decay, and tooth decay is lethal without modern health care.

Cats do frequent maintenance, licking themselves every day.

Cats also have to trim their nails often.

Sounds unlikely to me, but what the fuck do I know.

What was the average human life expectancy before the 1900s?

The question is kind of asinine considering life expectancy wasn't that long until recently and the most of the things op posted have little to do with life expectancy. In fact oily and dry skin would be advantageous in specific environments and most likely evolved in populations for that purpose.

Everything you just mentioned seems to be a cosmetic problem; not something that would impede survival.
Dandruff, oily skin, and hair loss are natural body processes. A lot of those problems were actually "created" by hygiene companies. I think that the human race as a whole has become obsessed with vanity in the absence of a proper threat to survival.

All the things you mentioned are not object to natural selection. You can have all these things at the same time and still be a fully functional human that can reproduce countless times.

Humans have shit teeth because we don't need good teeth to survive. Thus there's little evolutional pressure for it.

You think animals dont have waste products? Are you retarded or something?

Remember that there's also a lot of money to be made of this
There was this book - I should really look for the paper - on microbes that said tribal people don't smell because they have the right microbes

The same book claimed that acne is abscent in some populations because of diet and antibiotics destroying certain beneficial bacteria in the gut

Too oily or too dry skin sounds like a microbe problem to me

>hair loss
STOP REMINDING ME

the opposite, humans lived in filth and toiled in the fields for millenia, we were covered with lice and suffered from arthritis and malnutrition due to a mostly grain diet, we evolved things we don't really need like an excessive response to parasites

We are not comparable to other species because of our history.

FE humans participated in the Columbian Exchange (ALL genetic material going to and from the old and new worlds back in the day). This involves things like 95% kill rates of native populations caused by a cocktail of diseases brought to the new world, or modern day South Koreans pretending that their culinary traditions and food isnt simply stuff that was taken from the new world and brought to colony's and trading posts etc.

Humans have also eradicated all bugs and parasites which formed a part of our evolutionary relation to disease and the environment (read martin blasers book).

Some are trying to get parasites and put them inside themselves in order to stop their immune diseases.

>Acne, crooked teeth that need braces, too oily or too dry skin, dandruff, hair loss, etc..
k kid

A lot of the problems you mention are not "natural" problems but are caused by our modern life style. Only need to look at hunter-gatherers to realize this.

Differences include diet (low potassium and high sodium, too little omega3 and magnesium, too much sugar, oxidized fats), antibiotics (kills gut flora for years, messes it up for a lifetime even), living indoors (sunlight is required for Vitamin D, nitric oxide and melatonin suppression during daytime), electric lighting (kills melatonin production during nighttime), soap/shampoo (kills N. eutropha on our skin), chlorine in drinking water (bladder cancer, asthma), hundreds of chemicals we haven't tested really well, etc.

It's probable to me that crooked teeth is due to vitamin K2 depletion. Acne is probably due to a lot of things, like wrong gut microbiota (Lactobacillus probiotics help) and skin microbiota (N. eutropha might help, some P. acnes strains are worse than others) as well as some dietary factors (fish is helpful according to studies), problems with antioxidant system (selenium etc).

I disagree. I'm uggo and ive reproduced and all my uggo friends have reproduced

Id say it's a healthy mix of our defiance of natural selection and our age.

Most other animals don't live past about 20 or 30 years and in all honesty I don't think we really care or notice if an animal that's supposed to live about as long as a human dies early.

As for acne, teeth, skin, and all that it's probably something we don't notice or care about. Some is our rejection of our natural diet causing imbalances, how often do you see third world pizza faces? How would you know an animal doesn't have dry skin, a little dandruff, any of that?

Our jaws are shrinking which leads to teeth crowding.

Eugenics

Because making humanity smart, beautiful, and healthy for eternity is evil if you hurt a few people's feelings along the way.

>Acne, crooked teeth that need braces, too oily or too dry skin, dandruff, hair loss, etc
Literally irrelevant and yes other animals get them, they just don't care.

Wild animals are huge fucking messes. If you find a long lived predator and do an autopsy on it, you'll find years of horrific health problems and suffering and you'll just wonder how it survived as long as it did.

Nature is brutal, life is short and fragile, and all those things you do to upkeep your body are trivial in the face of the alternatives. Humans live decades longer than they need to.

having crooked teeth is from having smaller jaws than our ancestors
all the other stuff doesn't really matter in the long run

Eugenics is a very complicated matter by itself.

Creating an adequate eugenics program would mean selecting traits, while at the same time accepting an adequate proportion of biochemical variations, maybe even acceptable mistakes, so one single epidemic don't wipe out humanity in its lowest point.

People will talk you about malaria and sickle cell disease, but VIH resistant people can be associated to blood type, leucocyte formation or even how the B cells express their proteins even thought they can be considered a genetic illness.

Then the obvious problem is, what is actually a "good" trait and if such trait can actually be expanded through eugenics in a reasonable time?

Metabolism and muscle composition and distribution is easy to adapt and in around 100 years(5 human generations) you might get your average nazi propaganda kind of body, of course, you would also need more calories wether you like it or not and there is no way to tell if there are going to be side unexpected defects, which is big problems since fuck ups of an eugenics program will have to live with that the rest of their lives.

Intelligence is another dominion and you cannot expect to simply improve it only through eugenics, but rather nurturing, and if you improve things through nurturing in the short term, whats the point of eugenics for intelligence in the first place? And thats without talking what intelligence are we trying to improve or if we understand intelligence or even if improving one part of human intelligence doesn't diminish the other parts.

A well studied and acceptable eugenics program would be an spectacle that deserves to be seen, and if not... eugenics will happen anyway the difference will be if its going to be state or the people the ones who choose what traits to bring to this world.

He's right, the jaws of people in the past were different.
Most people these days have a some overbite, so their teeth rest with the top ones slightly occluding the bottom ones; in the past, when we ate tougher food and had to use our facial muscles a lot more for tearing our meals apart, peoples' teeth rested in a position with no overbite. One can see this in the skeletons of people from different eras -- Richard III, for example, had teeth that met at the edge.

lol you fucking brainlet.

>Do animals even get problems like this?
yes. it's just that no one cares.

We only had to reach about age 15 to breed. Unless a random protohuman's mutations were severe enough to keep him from raping a chick, they were probably passed on.
You'll notice there isn't much variation between the hands of the different human breeds. Our hands are perfect.

Children these days have incredibly soft diets. Think of most children's food. The stuff most people feed them and the things they're most willing to accept. Muscle development influences bone development. I'm sure there already exists some studies/papers on that connection. Anecdotally, my sister and I chewed a lot of gum from puberty onward, and we both have night time teeth grinding issues. We have much more robust jaws than our parents and our younger brother, who did not chew gum and does not have grinding issues. It's just a correlation, but it's interesting.

you are free to practice eugenics
don't breed

modern way of life is not healthy or natural for us

look up hygiene hypothesis, helminth therapy, NCD epidemic

What about genetics based on behavior? Yes, the obvious nurture factor would influence, but it'd still eventually work out if you just disallow breeding from the worst 40% of violent criminals or something along those lines.

Gnawing rodents do seem to have very straight teeth.

Most of there problems bar hairloss would not exist if not for our modern lifestyle. Skin problems are due to harsh chemicals, bad teeth due to eating soft food, dandruff due to shampoos etc. Go to any isolated tribe and see that none of these problems exist. Not because of natural selection but because of their lifestyles.

But that would be dysgenic, silly goose. One day I will sit you down and explain the difference.

Just a century ago, the incidence of myopia was rare. Myopia is so very common nowadays. Now, you might wonder how undiagnosed myopia was in the past, but it is strange to believe that it was as prevalent as it is now (see the map, for example). One would expect it to be a debilitating condition in the past that would prevent an organism, such as us, to ever succeed at bearing offspring.

What is, in fact, happening is that, our environment is changing due to technology, and it is causing many strange conditions. The high calorific diet that results in diabetes, the lethargic lifestyle that results in obesity, the entrapment of children indoors and the resultant myopia.

>the human body requires a lot of unusual high maintenance?
There is a certain truth to what you are saying, i.e., humans are able to pass on ever greater defects to their children due to the lowered requirements on "survival." For instance, a number of things have occurred in recent times: the women who disguise their poor skin with makeup and surgery, the men who use steroids to make their physique more attractive, and most importantly the criteria for mate selection itself. Women's choice of mates has drastically changed with technology and the political atmosphere, especially so in the past decade due to the internet. At the same time, technology has played with our procedural development in ways we don't completely understand. Take for instance, plastics and their impact on fish sexuality. The environment is always part of you and I, and the code we run as we grow takes input from it.

>Do animals even get problems like this?
What I have noticed is that, animals carry a number of defects just as humans do, but the tolerances are drastically narrower for reproduction. In essence, we see these kind of changes in animals when they become domesticated. We are in fact a domesticated beings, i.e., [math]homo[/math] [math]domesticus[/math]: a man belonging to the house.

>One would expect it to be a debilitating condition in the past that would prevent an organism, such as us, to ever succeed at bearing offspring.

I'm technically myopic, but it doesn't even affect me reading.

HAHA, IDIOT

RATS DON'T LIVE IN A CYBERNETICLY CONNECTED WORLD WITH MASS AGRICULTURE, BIG PHARMA AND PAID POLITICIANS - OF COURSE THEY DON'T HAVE ACNE

Animals have a lot more problems, and they usually die from them (even the non threatening ones, as they are also generally less pain resistant.)

There was, however, in our distant past, a genetic bottleneck in which maybe less than twenty thousand humans were remaining, living together in an isolated area for maybe a millennia or more, resulting in a whole lotta inbreeding. As a result, we're one of the most genetically homogenous mammals on the planet, and a whole lot of our genetic difficulties and inherited diseases stem from that lengthy period of inbreeding.

About the only mammal more inbred than us is the Tazmanian Devil, and it's so inbred that it can spread cancers between members.

Civilization hasn't been around long enough to have a major genetic evolutionary impact, it having only been 10,000 years on the outside, but it's had a lot of minor ones. Generally, however, we're talking about things like lactose tolerance and maybe a slightly different bite. There's a lot of meming a brain size changes and the like, but it's mostly hogwash. Certainly, our athletes today are far stronger than those of the past, and we're all generally healthier. The most radical changes, such as specialization, have all been social, rather than genetic, or physiological changes being mostly about changes in habit rather than changes in genes.

In the end, it's less that we require more maintenance, and more that we have more ways to maintain ourselves. Plus, a lot of this maintenance isn't necessary - being social pleasantries or preventatives at best, and out right scams at worst.

It's a blemish, a condition that is manageable. You can argue that it doesn't make you worse off but same goes for a person with AIDS who survives with medication. Again, the conditions ranges in severity, with some who are unable to obtain a driver's permit--a most basic thing to be able to do in today's world.

What I was getting at was that conditions such as these are tolerated due to technological advances, at the same time their origin, for some of them at least, lies in technology.

An interesting article on the subject of myopia.
nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120

I think thats something that was tried in 1940 to some extend in both the US and Germany; mandatory sterilization of criminals and crazy people, why it didn't work? Well, let me explain through an anecdote.

theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/03/how-i-discovered-i-have-the-brain-of-a-psychopath

Basically, this old story is about a psychiatrist who was doing an study on psychopathic brain patterns, and his own scanner slipped between the ones from the patients, so when he was reviewing them one by one he didn't recognize his own and classified himself as psychopath.

So, without asking ourselves if a criminal is actually a criminal or a madman is actually mad, you can see that nurturing can be actually more important than your genetics, and funnily enough its actually more easily in resources and politically to go the nurture route, than spend the next 500 years breeding the equivalent of a caste society.

its the lack of minerals in the western diet/water

your body doesnt get enough calcium etc to fully develop. your brain doesnt either.

the average american from 200 yeara ago would probably be better than prime modern americans in every way (athleticism, fertility, intelligence, stress management)

infant mortality was higher so this drives averages down. plenty of people lives into their 80s back then.

> genetic failures like that relentless weeded out in the animal kingdom, meanwhile we get this shit because our environment, our civilizations, basically let everyone survive

This contributes a lot, and will eventually become a big problem. Genetic error is just going to accumulate. We could be drastically less fit in just a few hundred years.

But on your actual topic, I dont think we require an unusually high amount of maintenance. Im not sure why you think that. Species that spend a lot of energy on maintenance might be effectively immortal, but such strategies arent favored by natural selection. They invest too much energy into surviving, and not enough on reproducing.

Thanks for posting this friend. I am constantly fighting this meme. Its a real joy to see someone else combatting it.

>the guardian
>thinking goofy stories demonstrate anything scientific
>thinking nurture matters
>using the word "nurture", and not "environment".

>Greentexting
>Poisoning the well
>Not even answering the point.

It doesn't only appear on the guardian, in fact when I first read it wasn't even in english, so its not fake.

Also, I use nurture since whats being discussed here is nurturevsnature, saying that its about the environment is just being picky.

>Then the obvious problem is, what is actually a "good" trait and if such trait can actually be expanded through eugenics in a reasonable time?

You could greatly increase IQ. I think jewish intelligence was created in a span of about 500 years. So, natural selection in Europe gave them an entire standard deviation of intelligence in 500 years. If you were deliberate about it, you could create larger gains, in less time.

Its a bit confusing to think about, because if you wanted to create a population of 160 IQ people, just find 160 IQ people. There you go, no eugenics necessary. But I guess we need a more wide spread gain in intelligence.

Stephen Hsu talked about the potential IQ gains we could engineer in the future. If you took two parents, and made their offspring have all the intelligence positive traits between them, you could easily get 200 IQ children, even from parents of unremarkable IQ. Its crazy. In theory, we could be cranking out 1000 IQ individuals soon, but I doubt such IQ could be reached. There have to be some hard neurological limits that we will reach before 1000 IQ people.

It was in the news. Its fake. The news is so ridiculously fake and if you are going to disagree you are just clueless. Its not even important tho, because if you had something better to offer than a dumb story you would have offered it. Thats the best youve got.

The scientific literature gave up on "nature vs nurture" a long time ago.

>Poisoning the well again.
>"The science is settled"

Whats the next step in your shitposting plan? Name calling?

I didnt say the science is settled, I just said the literature gave up on "nature vs nurture". Its a poor model. Some things are neither nature or nurture. Some are both. It doesnt make sense to phrase things in terms of nature or nurture.
>Whats the next step in your shitposting plan? Name calling?

Yes idiot.

Knowing that IQ is proportional (not linearly) to Brain Size. A 1000 IQ would require an huge Skull.
Such huge head would be weird by today standard.

A 200 IQ child is pretty feasible though.

So maybe physical appearance is not as much of a factor in selection as most people believe?

It maybe for casual sex, but for building a family both men and women select using very different things

>Acne, crooked teeth that need braces, too oily or too dry skin, dandruff, hair loss, etc..
None of that even matters, you can still live your life just fine even if you have all these problems and more

>physical appearance
Physical appearances are a proxy for health. When it comes down to it, the desire to reproduce takes precedent.
Take for instance people with severe disabilities who choose to have children even when it is 100% certain that their children will bear the same disabilities (especially true for the deaf community).

animals have fur so skin diseases are less apparent
animals live in nature where no doctor can see if they have a disease
animals cant complain about said diseases
wild animals have a healthier livestyle than most humans

>wild animals have a healthier livestyle than most humans
Most wild animals are riddled with diseases and are constantly on the edge of starvation.

But if you mean they get more exercise on average, yeah, sure.

>wild animals have a healthier livestyle than most humans
what the fuck does healthier "livestyle" even mean for wild animals you fucking dildo?
they're constantly struggling to survive and fighting disease and predators