The Rise and Fall of the Human Empire

There’s a time bomb ticking in our species. With each passing generation, we draw closer and closer to our own demise. Ironically, the same processes that some people like to believe never take place at all are slowly unraveling humanity from the inside out.

Species respond to their environments. If the water supply diminishes gradually over generations, those individuals who for whatever physiological reason need less water will survive and thus give birth to offspring who require less water. Those who require more than the environment can provide will tend to die off. As the environment changes so do the creatures that live in that environment. In addition, the pressure the environment places on populations tends to weed out deviations that diminish rates of survival. If an infant is born with some horrible deformity in the wild, the harsh environment into which it was born takes care of the situation by making sure the deformity will not live to procreate.

But what happens when there IS no selection pressure within a species? What happens when every offspring is allowed to not only live out their lives but also to spawn another generation with the same problems? The answer to this is not yet certain, but it does suggest an interesting thought experiment.

The most obvious route for our experiment is to follow the recent advances in reproductive medicine. Conditions that would have kept our mother’s mothers from being able to conceive at all are now surmountable though medical procedures. Currently the leading cause of infertility in women is polycystic ovary syndrome. Recent research indicates that this disorder has a strong genetic component so what happens if we use medical technology to allow the 10% of women with this problem to pass along their genes to their offspring? With each mother we help conceive, we make the problem worse. Where before we had one person with the defective genes in two generations we have multiplied the issue manifold. After a few hundred years, we are left with a population in which no one can conceive without medical assistance.

The issue is not limited merely to infertility. In a way, each time we save anyone from any disease, we weaken ourselves as a whole. In 1950 the infant mortality rate was 29.2 per 1000 births. In 2003 it was 6.9. Doubtless the average infant is healthier due to improvements in pre-natal nutrition but the fact remains that we save babies who are weaker and in turn more likely to give birth to weaker children themselves and thus more likely to need medical assistance.

As each succeeding generation passes, we slide further and further into dependence on our technology just to survive the world in which we live. At some point, the choice will have to be made and we will slide into Huxley’s “Brave New World.”