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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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It is impossible to have human society without selection pressures. Even some kind of posthuman society would still have selection pressure on memes and their equivalent of genes.

What would that even look like? No disease? Everyone lives forever, or has 2.1 kids with identical genes? No class mobility? No economic pressure?

There is also the issue of too much selection pressure being detrimental. As an example here notes, you can induce antibiotic resistance by exposing a bacterial colony on a petri dish to a gradient of antibiotic density. You can't make bacteria immune to anything by tossing them into the sun. You can't improve human society or the biosphere as a whole by exposing us to a gamma ray burst, or even something tamer like regularly showering the surface with cobalt bombs.

There is a massive gap between " some selection pressure exists and is useful" to "the degree of selection pressure present is optimal". It takes a lot of work to bridge the gap.

The collapse of Rome set back living standards in Europe by a thousand years. I sincerely doubt that whatever eugenic benefits came out of it (if any) were worth that much lost growth potential.

War can improve civilizational fitness, and also ruin it. WW2 possibly caused a tech-boom, WW3 might regress human civilization by a hundred years.