RE: https://mastodon.social/@Green_Footballs/115998586927326681
You know, if you're a white supremacist and your goal is to deniably exterminate the untermenschen in camps by negligently letting plagues rip through them instead of gassing them, it shows a REMARKABLE lack of foresight to put an anti-vaxx nutcase in charge of your master race's public health policy, doesn't it?
These guys are evil but they're not terribly smart.
If they think letting disease rip through the population will "evolve" us, by selecting for good genes... well, that takes a while to happen.
Here's a walk-through of a paper on the evidence for an ancient viral pandemic in Asia. Yes, it changed the genome... slightly (42 genes with evidence of some selective mutation).
But... that pandemic apparently ran for about 20,000 years.
@weekend_editor The idiots who favor "letting evolution take its course" fail to appreciate both how bloody and how random evolution is.
Of course, they don't understand much of how evolution actually works in general, so I suppose that's consistent.
As I used to like to tell collleagues, "If you're mostly not dying, then you're mostly not evolving."
Charlie Stross
Weekend Editor
John Maxwell