The Future of Humanitarian Relief?

[frogstamper]

I'm trying to explain why disease is so rife in the first place. because nature has devised ways of controlling populations and species. it's the way it is. the fittest and smartest of the species survive. the weak and stupid will die out.

Are you for real Bender? What absolute tripe this is, what if for example you were put in a third world village, not a refugee camp but a normal third world say African village that relies on their own crops and ingenuity, how long would you survive?
Without the help, compassion, kindness and charity of the others you wouldn't last a week, by your reckoning that puts you in the camp of the "weak and stupid"!! A ridiculous claim, what if the villages crops fail? what then sod em let em die!!
Where ever any of us live in this world is a lottery, the likes of us in the western world have hit the jackpot as opposed to the poor sods who struggle to survive each day.
I'm just glad that views such as yours are in a very small minority, just to add a side point if you were to do a little bit of research into "human natural selection" you'll find some very odious people also shared these same views, getting rid of them cost millions of lives.

BTW compassion and empathy are not derived from religious virtues, they are derived from ones own humanity, they cannot be bestowed by religion.
Quite a claim considering the posters who've taken issue with your claims, I'd confidently say both were atheists.

Originally Posted by Maggy J

Luckily the regular CF posters are not representative of the majority viewpoint if the recent Comic Relief results are anything to go by...

What I find interesting in these type of threads is trying to guess who are the wind-up merchants and who are the dissocial personalities.

[danielf]

Originally Posted by Bender

whereby 'favourable' traits are a defining factor when choosing a mate to breed with you mean? and the eventual canceling out of unwanted traits and genes through generations of reproduction. yes, I get that. but nature also has a balance that it will keep. the weakest will die, the strongest will survive. less about 'selection', more about balance. selection is obviously part of that process, but only a part. not the whole.

linky
another linky

Yes, you got that bit right. What you don't seem to grasp is the timescale. Evolution doesn't have any noticeable effects over a couple of generations (not in humans anyway). Genetically, there really is very little that sets you and me apart from people in the developing world. If anything, they are hardier for having survived the odds which given the difference in wealth and hygiene are firmly in our favour, not theirs.

In the short term, there is no relation between people dying and their level of fitness or stupidity. People don't die because they are weak. They die because they are poor and don't have access to proper sanitation.

Have a look at the top ten killer diseases in the developing world.

http://www.alertnet.org/topkillerdiseases.htm

Number four is bloody diarrhoea, responsible for around 7 to 8 percent of all deaths in the developing world. Yes, you'd have to be really stupid to die from that, particularly if you're five years old, and there's no clean drinking water around.

The truth of the matter is that you are alive and healthy (presumably) not because of your superior genes that result from the favourable evolution of the Western world, but because you were born on a continent that is rich. Leaving the developing world to their own devices because that's just natural selection at work is not only misguided and immoral, it's also stupid because it's not in our interest.

Aid, or more particularly, increasing wealth in the developing world is going to benefit us for two main reasons. It will drive down the population as people will feel less compelled to have many children as they do right now because they will be dependent on them in old age. It will reduce migration, as there will be less to flee from.