An interesting conundrum

 

From Eaton Rapids Joe:

Are more people carrying "crazy-genes" then they did in the past?

The short answer is "yes".

As recently as 1900 in developed countries like Ireland, England and Germany, if your mother was crazy you were probably not going to live to see your first birthday ... In total, crazy-genes had a high probability of "dead-ending". In those days the pool of crazy people resulted from random meetings of recessive genes or in new mutations.

Flash-forward to the permissive, Welfare-State.

... back when "crazy-genes" self-extinguished we experienced a rate of approximately 5% seriously crazy people. Now the crazy-people genes are subsidized rather than exposed to Darwinian selection and the numbers are growing much faster (due to high risk behaviors) than the numbers of not-crazy people.

There's more at the link, including examples.  Recommended reading.

I hadn't made the connection in genetic terms.  Like almost everybody, I've noted the increase in the number of crazy-behaving "street people":  talking to themselves, gesticulating wildly even though they're not talking to anybody, behaving very oddly and sometimes self-destructively, and so on.  However, without thinking about it much, I'd assumed that much of this was due to the lack of mental health care (after the closure of most sanatoriums and institutional mental health care facilities).  I hadn't thought about the fact that the sheer survival rate of everyone, on average, also meant that more "crazy-genes" were also surviving, and therefore slowly increasing in proportion to the rest of the population.

So . . . if that's the case, how are we going to deal with the problem?  We can't very well simply execute those with "crazy-genes" - not and still regard ourselves as human beings.  On the other hand, we do them (and ourselves, and our society) no favors by allowing them to increasingly take over our streets.  What next?

Peter