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KillerPacifist1 t1_j1h4j21 wrote

Death also isn't needed for evolution, only varying amounts of reproduction between individuals.

Specifically, death by aging is likely an unintential outcome of evolution, rather than something that evolution needs in order for it to happen. I can get into the mechanics of how aging likely evolved, but it is a bit a biology lesson.

I would also hesitate to say that we have stopped evolving in "interesting ways" (whatever that means). Evolution happens on a very slow time scale and I do not think anyone has a good handle on what our current environment most selects for or how strongly it selects for it. Seeing how it is difficult to point to any evolutionary changes in the past 5,000 years (a vast majority of which were before modern medicine and food production techniques), to say definitively we have stopped evolving in the last 50-100 years since the invention of antibiotics and vaccines and adoption of modern agriculture is jumping the gun a bit.

Especially since it isn't like we've totally eradicated untimely deaths (that is to say death before reproduction). We still have 3.1 million young children dying of starvation and 5 million dying of disease each year. Even ignoring deaths among older children/teenagers, we are losing over 1 person in 20 before they have a chance to reproduce.

Even ignoring the modern death rates among young children and babies, there is still a great discrepancy in birth rates among individuals and that is what evolution actually acts on. An adult who made a conscious decision not to have children (an increasingly common phenomenon) is just as evolutionarily unfit as a baby who died before their first birthday.

For a population to be truly evolutionary stable it needs to be infinitely large (8 billion may approximate that), each individual must mate randomly (definitely not true), and there must be no selection pressures (unlikely, as I layed out above).

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