That British Amateur Naturalist had it all Wrong

So the Darwin year has drawn to an end.

The appreciation of Darwin has gone through ups and downs over the last 150 years. Presently, hist stature is: first there was darkness. Then there was the Big Bang of 'The Origin of Species'. The Best Idea Ever. The foundation of biology, all later biology has been filling in the blanks and writing the footnotes. What's more, biology is moving from a hobbyist 'postage stamp collecting' kind of science into a central cientific discipline, with Darwianian/ 'modern synthesis' thought as its central paradigm.


But...what if Darwin was wrong?

What's more, what if it is of merely academic interest whether Darwin was right or wrong, but that the more devastating conclusion is that Darwinian evolution is not the most relevant way to understand life to begin with? Could our most basic understanding of life turn out to be a mere product after all of lingering Victorian British thought?


1 - Lamarck was right after all. :knight:

Lamarck's general principle that lifestyle might be able to influence heredity has been scorned ever since that British amateur naturalist rose to prominence. Today any high school student knows that genes are passed on unchanged from parent to child, and to the next generation and the next. Lifestyle cannot alter heredity.

Except now it turns out that it can:

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Take, to begin with, the Swedish chickens. Three years ago, researchers led by a professor at the university of Linköping in Sweden created a henhouse that was specially designed to make its chicken occupants feel stressed. The lighting was manipulated to make the rhythms of night and day unpredictable, so the chickens lost track of when to eat or roost. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they showed a significant decrease in their ability to learn how to find food hidden in a maze.
The surprising part is what happened next: the chickens were moved back to a non-stressful environment, where they conceived and hatched chicks who were raised without stress – and yet these chicks, too, demonstrated unexpectedly poor skills at finding food in a maze. They appeared to have inherited a problem that had been induced in their mothers through the environment. Further research established that the inherited change had altered the chicks' "gene expression" – the way certain genes are turned "on" or "off", bestowing any given animal with specific traits. The stress had affected the mother hens on a genetic level, and they had passed it on to their offspring.


The Swedish chicken study was one of several recent breakthroughs in the youthful field of epigenetics, which primarily studies the epigenome, the protective package of proteins around which genetic material – strands of DNA – is wrapped. The epigenome plays a crucial role in determining which genes actually express themselves in a creature's traits: in effect, it switches certain genes on or off, or turns them up or down in intensity. It isn't news that the environment can alter the epigenome; what's news is that those changes can be inherited. And this doesn't, of course, apply only to chickens: some of the most striking findings come from research involving humans.


One study, again from Sweden, looked at lifespans in Norrbotten, the country's northernmost province, where harvests are usually sparse but occasionally overflowing, meaning that, historically, children sometimes grew up with wildly varying food intake from one year to the next. A single period of extreme overeating in the midst of the usual short supply, researchers found, could cause a man's grandsons to die an average of 32 years earlier than if his childhood food intake had been steadier. Your own eating patterns, this implies, may affect your grandchildren's lifespans, years before your grandchildren – or even your children – are a twinkle in anybody's eye.


It might not be immediately obvious why this has such profound implications for evolution. In the way it's generally understood, the whole point of natural selection – the so-called "modern synthesis" of Darwin's theories with subsequent discoveries about genes – is its beautiful, breathtaking, devastating simplicity. In each generation, genes undergo random mutations, making offspring subtly different from their parents; those mutations that enhance an organism's abilities to thrive and reproduce in its own particular environment will tend to spread through populations, while those that make successful breeding less likely will eventually peter out.


As years of bestselling books by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others have seeped into the culture, we've come to understand that the awesome power of natural selection – frequently referred to as the best idea in the history of science – lies in the sheer elegance of the way such simple principles have generated the unbelievable complexities of life. From two elementary notions – random mutation, and the filtering power of the environment – have emerged, over millennia, such marvels as eyes, the wings of birds and the human brain.


Yet epigenetics suggests this isn't the whole story. If what happens to you during your lifetime – living in a stress-inducing henhouse, say, or overeating in northern Sweden – can affect how your genes express themselves in future generations, the absolutely simple version of natural selection begins to look questionable. Rather than genes simply "offering up" a random smorgasbord of traits in each new generation, which then either prove suited or unsuited to the environment, it seems that the environment plays a role in creating those traits in future generations, if only in a short-term and reversible way. You begin to feel slightly sorry for the much-mocked pre-Darwinian zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose own version of evolution held, most famously, that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors were "obliged to browse on the leaves of trees and to make constant efforts to reach them". As a matter of natural history, he probably wasn't right about how giraffes' necks came to be so long. But Lamarck was scorned for a much more general apparent mistake: the idea that lifestyle might be able to influence heredity. "Today," notes David Shenk, "any high school student knows that genes are passed on unchanged from parent to child, and to the next generation and the next. Lifestyle cannot alter heredity. Except now it turns out that it can . . ."

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2 - Evolution is mostly horizontal

Even more devastating is the notion that genes do not just pass from parent to offspring, but between organisms.

What's more, evolution itself may have changed from horizontal to vertical. Vertical evolution merely a stage in an evoultion that evolves.

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We've learned that huge proportions of the human genome consist of viruses, or virus-like materials, raising the notion that they got there through infection – meaning that natural selection acts not just on random mutations, but on new stuff that's introduced from elsewhere. Relatedly, there is growing evidence, at the level of microbes, of genes being transferred not just vertically, from ancestors to parents to offspring, but also horizontally, between organisms. The researchers Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfield conclude that, on average, a bacterium may have obtained 10% of its genes from other organisms in its environment.

To an outsider, this is mind-blowing: since most of the history of life on earth has been the history of micro-organisms, the evidence for horizontal transfer suggests that a mainly Darwinian account of evolution may be only the latest version, applicable to the most recent, much more complex forms of life. Perhaps, before that, most evolution was based on horizontal exchange. Which gives rise to a compelling philosophical puzzle: if a genome is what defines an organism, yet those organisms can swap genes freely, what does it even mean to draw a clear line between one organism and another? "It's natural to wonder," Goldenfield told New Scientist recently, "if the very concept of an organism in isolation is still valid at this level." In natural selection, we all know, the fittest win out over their rivals. But what if you can't establish clear boundaries between rivals in the first place?

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And what to make of recent developments in human-controlled genetic tinkering? Strides in scientific progress have enormous philosophical consequences for the thought of evolution as a random process.



3 - Ann Coulter is smarter than Darwin.

The American rightwing noisemaker Ann Coulter makes the point in her 2006 pro-creationist tirade Godless: The Church of American Liberalism. "Through the process of natural selection, the 'fittest' survive, [but] who are the 'fittest'? The ones who survive!" she sneers. "Why, look – it happens every time! The 'survival of the fittest' would be a joke if it weren't part of the belief system of a fanatical cult infesting the Scientific Community.":

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Jerry Fodor, the American philosopher. Fodor's objection is a distant cousin of one that rears its head every few years: doesn't "survival of the fittest" just mean "survival of those that survive", since the only criterion of fitness is that a creature does, indeed, survive and reproduce.

As far as I can make out, it can be summarised in three steps. Step one: Fodor notes – undeniably correctly – that not every trait a creature possesses is necessarily adaptive. Some just come along for the ride: for example, genes that express as tameness in domesticated foxes and dogs also seem to express as floppy ears, for no evident reason. Other traits are, as logicians say, "coextensive": a polar bear, for example, has the trait of "whiteness" and also the trait of "being the same colour as its environment". (Yes, that's a brain-stretching, possibly insanity-inducing statement. Take a deep breath.) Step two: natural selection, according to its theorists, is a force that "selects for" certain traits. (Floppy ears appear to serve no purpose, so while they may have been "selected", as a matter of fact, they weren't "selected for". And polar bears, we'd surely all agree, were "selected for" being the same colour as their environment, not for being white per se: being white is no use as camouflage if snow is, say, orange.)

Step three is Fodor's coup de grace: how, he says, can that possibly be? The whole point of Darwinian evolution is that it has no mind, no intelligence. But to "select for" certain traits – as opposed to just "selecting" them by not having them die out – wouldn't natural selection have to have some kind of mind? It might be obvious to you that being the same colour as your environment is more important than being white, if you're a polar bear, but that's because you just ran a thought-experiment about a hypothetical situation involving orange snow. Evolution can't run thought experiments, because it can't think. "Darwin has a theory that centrally turns on the notion of 'selection-for'," says Fodor. "And yet he can't give an account – nobody could give an account – of how natural selection could distinguish between correlated traits. He waffles."

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Link, with further links at the bottom.

The first two are fascinating. I'm not sure what the third guy is smoking though. We say "selecting" just for lack of a better word.

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I find the points raised in the first to be vastly more intuitive than the plain theory of natural selection on it's own.

I agree that many questions remain about evolution, and how life came to exist and to diversify. There are things the theory cannot explain as it currently stands. Of course, this is the nature of theories in general. It must be constantly open to revision and refinement as new discoveries are made, and it must not be considered holy in such a way that it cannot be thrown out when it is shown insufficient. I don't think Darwinian evolution is the be all and end all of biology. After all Newtonian laws of motion were not the be all and end all of physics. Eventually, we will come up with a better explanation. Probably we will still hold Darwin in esteem, both for the elegance of his ideas, and for the profound effect they will have had on the history of his field, but he will be replaced.

Of course, taking the Ann Coulter approach to criticizing Darwin is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, a theory is imperfect. Of course it will be imperfect. This does not mean we cannot come to a better understanding of phenomena through scientific inquiry. Creationist 'science' is essentially giving up. Darwinian evolution, whatever its shortcomings, has far too much explanatory power to be completely discarded out of hand.

Ajax

survival of the fittest is right. ann coulter is just an idiot. its being stomped upon by medical science though. And wars screw with it because often the strong die and the weak survive.

supposedly we are getting stronger and smarter but i bet in 100 years we will have atrophied limbs except for texting thumbs.

God said to Dawkins go create your own life.

Dawkins said ok all I need is some dust.

God replied get your own dust

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

supposedly we are getting stronger and smarter but i bet in 100 years we will have atrophied limbs except for texting thumbs.

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You don't want to confuse 'stronger and smarter' with 'the fittest.' Chickens aren't particularly strong and aren't particularly smart. I suspect whatever wild cousins they have beat them out on both strength and intelligence, yet good luck matching the numbers of domesticated ones. Of course, Louis has already suggested the very concept of 'the fittest' may not mean much, since its definition is pretty circular. Anyhow, strength and intelligence are not necessary for biological success. Successful reproduction is the measure.

Ajax

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You don't want to confuse 'stronger and smarter' with 'the fittest.' Chickens aren't particularly strong and aren't particularly smart. I suspect whatever wild cousins they have beat them out on both strength and intelligence, yet good luck matching the numbers of domesticated ones. Of course, Louis has already suggested the very concept of 'the fittest' may not mean much, since its definition is pretty circular. Anyhow, strength and intelligence are not necessary for biological success. Successful reproduction is the measure.

Ajax

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You mean faster reproduction as well. And im talking about how people are growing taller, supposedly smarter, etc.

But i walk into my calculus class and i'm not so sure.

Basically im saying weaker genes are being passed along because of science. Now this isnt a bad thing all people deserve to live but the results are what they are. Even reproduction isnt fail safe with tihngs like artificial insemination.

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

You mean faster reproduction as well. And im talking about how people are growing taller, supposedly smarter, etc.

But i walk into my calculus class and i'm not so sure.

Basically im saying weaker genes are being passed along because of science. Now this isnt a bad thing all people deserve to live but the results are what they are. Even reproduction isnt fail safe with tihngs like artificial insemination.

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The genes used in artificial insemination need to come from somewhere. If that's what it comes to, then whatever makes someone most likely to be a successful sperm donor is whatever would make them 'fittest.' Ultimately, the only measure is whether your genetic material survives in subsequent generations. Whatever got it there (physical prowess, intelligence, knowing the right people, having a good health plan, having rich parents, etc.) is irrelevant.

Ajax

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

And wars screw with it because often the strong die and the weak survive.

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No it doesn't, war is actually beneficial to reproduction of the strongest.

Yes, the best usually ends up dead. But who cares? Because of their status as ideal genes they've already found a partner and reproduced themselves. Whether they're still alive beyond that point is irrelevant.

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

And im talking about how people are growing taller

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Myth. People are actually just as tall as they ever were and could be genetically. It's just more stable diets have allowed us to grow to our maximum height.

The second is particularily interesting, and it is especially true in plants. Chloroplast in plant cells are believed to have evolved from cyanobacteria.

but what if weaker genetic material survives and reproduces?

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No it doesn't, war is actually beneficial to reproduction of the strongest.

Yes, the best usually ends up dead. But who cares? Because of their status as ideal genes they've already found a partner and reproduced themselves. Whether they're still alive beyond that point is irrelevant.

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not necessarily. Especially in western society most young men (18) are not married and have not reproduced yet. and im sorry to say many of the weaker men are then given desk jobs because they cannot fight. They rarely die. The stronger ones are left to be front line combat troops and in that position they have a higher chance of being killed before they can reproduce and pass on their genes.

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Myth. People are actually just as tall as they ever were and could be genetically. It's just more stable diets have allowed us to grow to our maximum height.

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True i didn't even think about it, like the difference between the mongol invader compared to the average chinese.

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

And wars screw with it because often the strong die and the weak survive.

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That's kinda rubbish, it's survival of the fittest, not the strongest, and whoever survives is the fitter/more fit per definition.

The OP is quite...well, I hope Louis's genes can't infect me over the internet, I'd suddenly start telling everybody how bad others historically were to promote all things french.
Of course Darwin isn't the best explanation we have anymore but he laid the foundations.
Point two I already heard of, at least concerning microorganisms IIRC.
And point three has been obvious for quite a while. :clown:

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

not necessarily. Especially in western society most young men (18) are not married and have not reproduced yet. and im sorry to say many of the weaker men are then given desk jobs because they cannot fight. They rarely die. The stronger ones are left to be front line combat troops and in that position they have a higher chance of being killed before they can reproduce and pass on their genes.

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I'm talking historically, as the prestige of the soldier has collapsed over the last decades, to say the least....

EDIT: And anyway, natural selection is an observation of how things work, it is by no means a guide on how to organize our society or anything like that.

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I'm talking historically, as the prestige of the soldier has collapsed over the last decades, to say the least....

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still no, WW2, WW1 it still applies. Unless you go back to pre industry it works. Which would make sense if you are talking about Norwegian fighting prowess :wink:

And the soldier now has to be smarter and in some ways physically superior. A truly superb soldier these days is much harder to achieve than in say 1235.

he may be 'wrong', but he had a good innings.

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

still no, WW2, WW1 it still applies. Unless you go back to pre industry it works. Which would make sense if you are talking about Norwegian fighting prowess :wink:

And the soldier now has to be smarter and in some ways physically superior. A truly superb soldier these days is much harder to achieve than in say 1235.

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Homo Sapiens is about 200.000 years old. To talk about the last 100 years when discussing its evolution is ridicilous.

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Originally Posted by HoreTore

Homo Sapiens is about 200.000 years old. To talk about the last 100 years when discussing its evolution is ridicilous.

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Unless #1 is true.

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Homo Sapiens is about 200.000 years old. To talk about the last 100 years when discussing its evolution is ridicilous.

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those are the most destructive wars of our time right next to each other. The last hundred years of the human race will probably do more to alter humanity through science than any other time period.

and actually its only about 5000 years old.

:clown:

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

those are the most destructive wars of our time right next to each other. The last hundred years of the human race will probably do more to alter humanity through science than any other time period.

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Science, sure, but we're talking about our genes here, not our tech.

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

and actually its only about 5000 years old.

:clown:

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lolz.

Evolution has moved far beyond the works of Darwin.

Also, lifestyle does affect evolution, as in, the environment affects the survival of certain aspects compared to others.

As for the chickens, the young chicks probably pick up behaviours from their parents, and since their parents behaviour was already shot due to the experiment, this shot behaviour was taught to the children.

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Originally Posted by Beskar

Evolution has moved far beyond the works of Darwin.

Also, lifestyle does affect evolution, as in, the environment affects the survival of certain aspects compared to others.

As for the chickens, the young chicks probably pick up behaviours from their parents, and since their parents behaviour was already shot due to the experiment, this shot behaviour was taught to the children.

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I'd like to see a more solid group of studies backing the effects they describe. But they did say that the tested the genes of the chicks, didn't they?

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Science, sure, but we're talking about our genes here, not our tech.

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ah but therein lies the difference. our tech is such a difference maker for survivability that it will affect the population.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

https://img80.imageshack.us/img80/45...arwincover.jpg

By necessity of thinking in language, we need to think in metaphor, in category, in a scheme.
I think the 'Tree of Life' metaphor that governs understanding of evolution, that is equated with evolution in common knowledge, is a product of 19th century science. The postmodernist in me would call it a Victorian historical-hierachical progress model. Yet because this metaphor is the language that describes evolution, science works within this scheme, is its product, reinforces it.

'If Darwin were alive today' (much as that contradicts my postmodernism which just reduced him to a product of his age) he would describe 'evolution' as a network process. Not just descibe it as such, but conceive of it as such. 'Wikipedia' might indeed be a better methaphor for nature than a closed structure hierachical tree.

Then again, maybe contemporary science thinks of evolution more and more as a network process precisely because modern science is a product of our time.

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"We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality," Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, told New Scientist magazine.
Genetic tests on bacteria, plants and animals increasingly reveal that different species crossbreed more than originally thought, meaning that instead of genes simply being passed down individual branches of the tree of life, they are also transferred between species on different evolutionary paths. The result is a messier and more tangled "web of life".

Microbes swap genetic material so promiscuously it can be hard to tell one type from another, but animals regularly crossbreed too - as do plants - and the offspring can be fertile. According to some estimates, 10 per cent of animals regularly form hybrids by breeding with other species.

Last year, scientists at the University of Texas at Arlington found a strange chunk of DNA in the genetic make-up of eight animals, including the mouse, rat and the African clawed frog. The same chunk is missing from chickens, elephants and humans, suggesting it must have become wedged into the genomes of some animals by crossbreeding.

The findings mean that to link species by Darwin's evolutionary branches is an oversimplification. "The tree of life is being politely buried," said Michael Rose, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine. "What's less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change."

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Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life

I don't particularly respect newscientist unfortunately. They tend to exaggerate for effect. After reading that, for all I know these are things that biologists have thought for decades.

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Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro

I don't particularly respect newscientist unfortunately. They tend to exaggerate for effect. After reading that, for all I know these are things that biologists have thought for decades.

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And what if I genetically alter a pig to have a lion's tail and elephant ears? It seems not outside the grasp of science.

Wouldn't this undermine the phylogenetic tree? Show how evolution within one species decides the evolution of other species.

Of course, considering that a pig is what humans have left of its wild boar ancestor, this process has been going on forever. Ever since predators in the Cambrian life explosion, evolution has been driven by inter-species interaction. It is a network process.


If I can be allowed a metaphor, biology keeps adding a new dimension to our understanding of the order of the natural world. From the one-dimensional Cabinets of curiosities in Renaissance thought. A collection of losse species, ordered on a single plane. To the two-dimensional Darwinian understanding that ordered life in a historical-hierarchical scheme. To current three dimensions, adding a better understanding of network processes.

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Originally Posted by Husar

The OP is quite...well, I hope Louis's genes can't infect me over the internet, I'd suddenly start telling everybody how bad others historically were to promote all things french.
Of course Darwin isn't the best explanation we have anymore but he laid the foundations.
Point two I already heard of, at least concerning microorganisms IIRC.
And point three has been obvious for quite a while. :clown:

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Oh, where's your sense of fun? Surely there's no merit in some E-tough rubbishing of the claims of an Alabama pseudo-scientific creationist.

No, fun is to chop away at one of the corner stones of our own secular-philosophical thought. ~D


As for German history - I really do think you've come under the spell of internet variants of it that take ancient propaganda and several fundamentally erroneous views, condense them, and then spread this pointless substract ad nauseum on the internet. It's boring, patently incorrect and ultimately unproductive. If you believe all of that, then obviously I'm a Germanophobe who is trying to whitewash the many crimes of the French and the Jews and the Bolshevists.
As for me promoting all things French: as Strike once said, he's not here to promote Kansas or Nebraska.

The thread is misleading, as I pretty much already said the punchline before Louis even bothered to clarify himself. Science has moved on from Darwin, so the original works of Darwin are not accurate, however, evolution is not wrong.

I might as well go "Thread: That Greek Astrocrat Amateur Thinker had it all Wrong" and write about how Plato is wrong.

In short, bad thread, and bad cover from New Scientist. It gives contrary information by removing the obvious contextual information.

These ideas have been current for a couple of years, I read a book by a British science writer that gathered some of them together. He was brutally and viciously attacked by Dawkins, of course. Sadly. I have lost the book; but I do remember that the Lamarckist approach was suggested by an Australian about 10 years ago.

I think the key problem with Darwinian evolution is that there is no evidence for the evolution of beneficial, purely random, traits. That rather undercuts the theory.

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

but what if weaker genetic material survives and reproduces?

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How exactly do you plan to measure the strength of genetic material? Is it gonna lift weights or something? The only way we have to measure genetic strength is success or failure in reproduction. Thus the only metric we can use does not allow the possibility of weaker genetic material surviving while stronger genetic material fails to reproduce. Failure to reproduce is genetic weakness.

Ajax

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How exactly do you plan to measure the strength of genetic material? Is it gonna lift weights or something? The only way we have to measure genetic strength is success or failure in reproduction. Thus the only metric we can use does not allow the possibility of weaker genetic material surviving while stronger genetic material fails to reproduce. Failure to reproduce is genetic weakness.

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Because for example some woman can have children yes. But they cannot birth them living because they have some sort of deficiency. so in nature they would be unable to reproduce, but thanks to mans science they can reproduce. Or how about a male who cannot get his partner pregant on his own. But with the help of invitiro (sp?) fertilization he manages to do so. was he supposed to reproduce.

Not that im saying that they shouldn't be allowed to do so its just a point.

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

Because for example some woman can have children yes. But they cannot birth them living because they have some sort of deficiency. so in nature they would be unable to reproduce, but thanks to mans science they can reproduce. Or how about a male who cannot get his partner pregant on his own. But with the help of invitiro (sp?) fertilization he manages to do so. was he supposed to reproduce.

Not that im saying that they shouldn't be allowed to do so its just a point.

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You're treating nature as if it doesn't include human beings. 'Man's science' is now a part of nature. It is a part of our environment. In nature, they are able to reproduce, and since they do so, they are 'the fittest.'

Ajax

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Originally Posted by Louis VI the Fat

Oh, where's your sense of fun?

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I'm german, did you forget already?

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Originally Posted by Louis VI the Fat

No, fun is to chop away at one of the corner stones of our own secular-philosophical thought. ~D

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Except that you aren't really.

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Originally Posted by Louis VI the Fat

As for German history - I really do think you've come under the spell of internet variants of it that take ancient propaganda and several fundamentally erroneous views, condense them, and then spread this pointless substract ad nauseum on the internet. It's boring, patently incorrect and ultimately unproductive. If you believe all of that, then obviously I'm a Germanophobe who is trying to whitewash the many crimes of the French and the Jews and the Bolshevists.
As for me promoting all things French: as Strike once said, he's not here to promote Kansas or Nebraska.

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And I do think you're a victim of French propaganda and revisionism, it's aggravating, patently incorrect and will only lead to WW3. At that point, survival of the fittest will decide the debate.
As for me promoting all things German: as Husar once said, he's not here to promote the Kaiser.

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You're treating nature as if it doesn't include human beings. 'Man's science' is now a part of nature. It is a part of our environment. In nature, they are able to reproduce, and since they do so, they are 'the fittest.'

Ajax

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no science tampers with the way we are supposed to interact with nature and almost allows us to twist it. Why is a man who is supposed to be unable to reproduce but because of science is saved natural.

not that that is a bad thing of course.

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

no science tampers with the way we are supposed to interact with nature and almost allows us to twist it. Why is a man who is supposed to be unable to reproduce but because of science is saved natural.

not that that is a bad thing of course.

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Should we also claim the genetic material in farming cultures is weak? After all, it's 'man's science' that allowed those cultures to achieve genetic success.

Treating science as something unnatural is as ridiculous as treating beaver dams and termite colonies as unnatural. Humans are a part of this world. We are part of its ecological makeup. We developed along natural processes. We share most of our genome with other creatures. The ways we interact with this world are no more natural or unnatural than those of any other creature. Part of how we interact with nature is informed by science. How is that unnatural? And what do you mean by 'supposed to be unable to reproduce'? Supposed by who? He's either able to reproduce or he isn't. In your example, it seems he is able to reproduce. So there's apparently nothing weak about his genes.

Ajax

“And wars screw with it because often the strong die and the weak survive.” Even worst: the weak don’t go to war, so only the fittest go to war… So, in term of genetic, after WW1 and WW2, the only male left for reproduction were the one who escape the front lines for whatever reason.