Hi, Peg.
As you’ve probably heard, there are two fundamental processes involved in the gestalt effect of evolution: (1) mutation and (2) natural selection. Mutation is a fundamentally undirected process that produces hordes of new information
1 without any regard to its usefulness. Natural selection is a "directed" process that filters all the new information by its usefulness to survival and reproduction, and actively prevents any deleterious information from propagating itself, often by simply killing it before it can propagate. In this, natural selection is not an actual force of nature, like gravity, but is simply the combined effect of myriads of environmental influences that can prevent propagation from occurring. It’s more convenient for us to refer to it by its gestalt, rather than by all the thousands of things that lead to it.
Please take care to notice that the Theory of Evolution only postulates
that mutations occur, not
how they occur. It is not a theory designed to explain what causes mutations: those causes can be radiation, pH fluctuations, statistical “typos” by the machinery in the cell, etc.: all of which are explanable by various theories of chemistry and biochemistry. Frankly, it wouldn’t matter if aliens from orbit were using bizarre technology to create mutations in populations: natural selection would still work on these and cause the best of them to outcompete the others.
The result of this is that ToE is not responsible for explaining how bad information happens in
individuals, but only how bad information effects the
population. So, the only thing evolution need explain in this case is how erectile dysfunction can
accumulate within a population. And, we can simply say that natural selection would tend to remove erectile dysfunction from a population (except, as Granny Magda mentioned, where it is a post-reproductive effect).
But, there’s a catch: humans have learned how to combat the forces of natural selection by learning how to get plants and livestock to produce more food, allowing people to survive fatal diseases and disorders, and, as you’ve noted, reproduce with dysfunctional genitalia. Nature is not choosing who gets to reproduce: individuals are choosing for themselves. So, obviously, this is not an example of “natural selection,” but of “personal selection.”
So, the moral of the story is that you shouldn't take anything that happens to humans these days as having anything to do with biological evolution.
-----
1 I personally don’t like the term “information” because of the can of worms it opens for most creationist/IDists, but it’s generally the easiest way to relate, so I sucked it up for this message.
-Bluejay
Darwin loves you.
™ Version 4.2
