On Wednesday, May 7, 2003, at 06:17 PM, Harmon Seaver wrote:
Ah, yes, just think what the modern protective society is doing to the gene pool. Eyeglasses is just one example -- how many people today would starve quickly if thrown back into a hunting/gathering culture without their specs?
Except there's no strong evidence that people without glasses saw better a thousand years ago. Maybe 10 thousand years ago. A lot of the "eagle eyes" were just people with naturally 20-20 vision. In most European and Asian societies going way, way back, most people didn't need good long and near vision past a certain age. They held things close, they squinted, and likely they did OK even in hunting parties where the animals were herded over cliffs or into box canyons. Eyeglasses have become common only in the past 100 years (and arguably in the past 60 years, about since the time visits to eye doctors became common). While there have been jokes about "four eyes" not breeding, because they can't get dates, neither this theory nor the converse appear to have any correlation with actual breeding patterns. Do more kids today need glasses than 100 years ago? Than 500 years ago? Than 5000 years ago? An interesting question, but claims that the past 60-100 years of eyeglass wearing have caused some major change in genetics seems to be a stretch.
Or just look at the difference in the last 100 years or so, where children who were "slow" were kept home on the farm, never married; whereas today they move out on their own, meet others like themselves, breed. And I'm not even talking about the welfare aspect, or the seriously retarded -- when I was a kid there were a lot of families with members who stayed home with the folks, or went to live with various relations, just a little too slow or too spooky.
I agree that things are very different now. I look at the economic side, mostly. Once the slow, or the drunkardly, or the inept, served on farms and estates and kept the horses, did gardening, and so on. Today, we pay them to sit at home and eat Doritos while watching Oprah. And yard workers are hard to find, and expensive. (I just got in from a muddy and dirty day spent moving dirt and sand, spent planting a Minneola Tangelo, and a couple of shrubs. Nearly five hours out digging, shoveling, mixing soil with amendments and manure, digging holes, planting, soaking the root balls, then cleaning up. Which is why I'm now posting, five hours after going out, exhausted, but happy to be back online. And I did much the same a few days ago, and a few days before that, and so on. Those who have been to my house know I have 1.5 acres on a hilltop, and it needs a lot of work to keep the weeds and chapparal from encroaching. My point? The cheap labor--the retards, the shiftless, the drunks--is now being paid out of my taxes (approaching 60% of what I earn) to collect AFDC, welfare, and the catch-all "disability." We need to abolish all of these payments and make the 'tards, the drunks, the unskilled all realize they either hoe the land for a relative pittance or they starve.) (I would hire some of the illegal alien Mexicans who hang out at our local K-Mart except some of them have reportedly tumbled to the fact that they can do a day's work and then threaten to report their illegal work (no SSNs, no Disability Insurance, blah blah) to the INS, who is more interested in catching a gringo hiring wetbacks than in deporting the wetbacks. Also, there are injury scams to collect payouts from gringo suckas.) --Tim May