For the Love of Health Care

"It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed" (247).

I found this quote quite fascinating and unfortunately very true. Darwin explains how when we are sympathetic, and give care to those who are too weak, we are weakening our species as a whole. He also makes a point that man is one of the only species who allows those weakest in his population to breed. As insensitive and immoral as it sounds, this statement speaks the truth. The human species is slowly weakening. I don't want to sound harsh, but for the sake of the argument, humans would be such a stronger species if we didn't save and nurture the weak. If we had limits on health care, perhaps those too sick to survive without modern technology would just die off and leave more space for the rest of the population. This is one of the reasons why the human population is out of control anyway, technology, our ability to cure almost any disease. People can live after huge, deadly diseases now because of our extensive health system. There are people with brain deformities living normal lives, people missing arms and legs, people with artificial hearts. In the natural world, none of these people would be able to survive. They would be the ones naturally selected, weeded out, for the good of the species.

But on the other hand. I like health care. I want to be treated, to be cured. That is another part of the natural selection. The will to live. One must have some sort of will to live in order to survive, obviously. That is why humans came up with health care in the first place. We are, once again adapting to our environment, finding ways around the natural checks. I just find this a delightful irony. As a species we survive by inventing ways to conquer death, but that is ultimately making us a weaker species.