Regardless of the fact that usefulness of vaccination has been proved a million times, it seems that the people's resistance against vaccines is continually growing. Some believe the problem could be solved through better education and informative public campaigns, but unfortunately those people are unrepentant optimists. The primary problem lies in our DNA, or the fact that many people's DNA is of low enough quality to make them blundering morons.
There is one thing in evolution called neutral shift. When a species no longer needs an adaptation, in time it is usually lost due to entropy, even if it is a generally beneficial mutation. There are many such examples - the flightless birds of Galapagos, virtually blind moles, and finally us humans who can't synthesise vitamin C because our ancestors were lousy enough hunters that their died had to be made up almost entirely of fruit. All those losses went practically unnoticed, as there was no real need for the abilities they hindered at the time the defects arose. It is quite unfortunate when the environment changes in a way to make those abilities quite relevant again, as the flightless mobile weasel lunchboxes and scurvy ridden sailors found out in the most horrible way. Getting back the functions of those genes after a long enough time is virtually impossible, as entropy works one way only and ultimately generates enough white noise to obfuscate any relevant information that may have laid underneath.
What's it got to do with vaccines? It seems that there is a similar neutral shift goin on in the human population over the past few hundred years, except this one is related to intelligence. A modern welfare state is a strong enough barrier for extinction due to one's own stupidity that intelligence is really no longer necessary to survive in a modern world. Quite the contrary, all that excess brainpower and things we use to entertain it happen to consume quite a lot of nutrients that could be used for procreation instead. Although evolution is generally a slow process, some changes happen surprisingly quickly. So it seems that white Europeans became white only in the last few thousand years http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin and measurably dumbed down in as short a time period as 200 years http://phys.org/news/2013-05-victorian-era-people-intelligent-modern-day-counterparts.html.
The question we should ask ourselves is not whether modern society, with its social safety net and financial support for the procreation of uneducated dimwits, has an effect on the overall stupidification of the human race, but rather to what extent. There is a point where an average human brain will atrophy far enough that even surviving in a modern welfare state will prove to be a life or death challenge. It seems that we're on the verge of that point, since refusing a free vaccination of a child could most certainly be classified as a solid example of endangering one's genes even in a society as safe as the world of today is. Because by refusing to vaccinate, a person raises the risk for the procreation of their genes with no visible benefit whatsoever. Even more importantly, those people tend to cluster together for their protests and random paranoid ramblings, meaning that they willingly give up on the herd immunity effect they've been riding on. It makes sense as much as if a thieve's guild would form a joint venture company with all their members as shareholders. Really, what could go wrong?
There are several ways to solve the problem. Unfortunately, none of them is pretty. Barring outright genocide, the most straightforward way to go about it is to finally accept eugenics as a relevant method of keeping our species in a decent state. It's like natural selection without all the gory details of being eaten by lions while still half alive, or falling apart from smallpox or the like. It would force the incompetent people to a lower fertility level, while forcing those more capable, whose minds are the engines that draw the civilization and the rest of the less fortunate forward, to have more kids or suffer some penalties. We could of course be shocked and outraged by these fascist methods, thanks to Mr. Hitler who made the subject of eugenics a taboo, and just wait for evolution to do its thing. The price of that inactivity is steep, because it can ultimately result only in an Idiocracy-type social disintegration and africanization of the western society. This do-nothing method would ultimately result in a situation that is even worse than the aforementioned genocide, but since it's a result of inactivity rather than active choice, it seems to be more acceptable in the minds of people whose brains are not really much more advance than an average chimpanzee's one, which translates to the majority of people today.
An interesting paradox lies in the fact that the thing which enables idiots to thrive and multiply is the very thing that they lack, or the high average intelligence of non-africans to be precise (http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf). Social state amplifies that distortion even further, by explicitly encouraging those people to have a higher procreation rate than the rest of the population through subventions for the minorities, less fortunate, etc. So while capable people are wasting their time and lives sitting in offices from dawn till dusk and catering to corporate cargo cults, carefully planning their 0.5-child families in the few hours they have left for worries of potential resource shortage, the incapable spend their days pounding and procreating without any plan or forethought, being hindered only by police arrests or drug overdoses.
Through most of human history, those people would ultimately die of hunger, but the only problem they have today is the fact that their Playstation is one generation older than the one in possession of their richer neighbors and that they don't spend their vacations in tropical paradises (most likely because they can't even find them on the map). Living in such mild relative poverty is not really the most pleasant way to live, but it is most certainly not life threatening. And the only thing genes care about is whether they'll transfer to the next generation, rather than worrying about the completely irrelevant subject of the well being of their carriers.
The problems of such an unstable system can already be felt today, and they manifest themselves in ever higher taxes and resource theft from people who are the primary creators of capital and the workhorses of the economy. These resources are transfered to sustain those who are basically incapable of surviving by themselves, whether it's dementia-stricken retirees with one foot in the grave who didn't feel the need to procreate considering the state-guaranteed financial safety for the elderly, or borderline retarded creatures who procreate not to make the future capital creators but an exponentially growing horde of welfare addicts.
Extrapolating these processes gives a very clear picture of the future - the capable and competent will become a small enough minority that the state simply won't be able to tax them enough in order to feed the rapidly growing bulk of the incompetents, and the system is bound to break at one point. When that happens, and when the hordes of idiots realize that they'll end up being hungry and on the street, we're about to enter the aforementioned African scenario. Will the human species recover? Through a few centuries or millenia, most likely yes, because natural selection which favors intelligence will resurface in a new and dangerous world. What we can pray for is that we now, or at least in the next iteration of civilization, finally accept eugenics as the only non-bloody solution to keep the high level of culture and society which we enjoy today.
There is one thing in evolution called neutral shift. When a species no longer needs an adaptation, in time it is usually lost due to entropy, even if it is a generally beneficial mutation. There are many such examples - the flightless birds of Galapagos, virtually blind moles, and finally us humans who can't synthesise vitamin C because our ancestors were lousy enough hunters that their died had to be made up almost entirely of fruit. All those losses went practically unnoticed, as there was no real need for the abilities they hindered at the time the defects arose. It is quite unfortunate when the environment changes in a way to make those abilities quite relevant again, as the flightless mobile weasel lunchboxes and scurvy ridden sailors found out in the most horrible way. Getting back the functions of those genes after a long enough time is virtually impossible, as entropy works one way only and ultimately generates enough white noise to obfuscate any relevant information that may have laid underneath.
What's it got to do with vaccines? It seems that there is a similar neutral shift goin on in the human population over the past few hundred years, except this one is related to intelligence. A modern welfare state is a strong enough barrier for extinction due to one's own stupidity that intelligence is really no longer necessary to survive in a modern world. Quite the contrary, all that excess brainpower and things we use to entertain it happen to consume quite a lot of nutrients that could be used for procreation instead. Although evolution is generally a slow process, some changes happen surprisingly quickly. So it seems that white Europeans became white only in the last few thousand years http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin and measurably dumbed down in as short a time period as 200 years http://phys.org/news/2013-05-victorian-era-people-intelligent-modern-day-counterparts.html.
The question we should ask ourselves is not whether modern society, with its social safety net and financial support for the procreation of uneducated dimwits, has an effect on the overall stupidification of the human race, but rather to what extent. There is a point where an average human brain will atrophy far enough that even surviving in a modern welfare state will prove to be a life or death challenge. It seems that we're on the verge of that point, since refusing a free vaccination of a child could most certainly be classified as a solid example of endangering one's genes even in a society as safe as the world of today is. Because by refusing to vaccinate, a person raises the risk for the procreation of their genes with no visible benefit whatsoever. Even more importantly, those people tend to cluster together for their protests and random paranoid ramblings, meaning that they willingly give up on the herd immunity effect they've been riding on. It makes sense as much as if a thieve's guild would form a joint venture company with all their members as shareholders. Really, what could go wrong?
There are several ways to solve the problem. Unfortunately, none of them is pretty. Barring outright genocide, the most straightforward way to go about it is to finally accept eugenics as a relevant method of keeping our species in a decent state. It's like natural selection without all the gory details of being eaten by lions while still half alive, or falling apart from smallpox or the like. It would force the incompetent people to a lower fertility level, while forcing those more capable, whose minds are the engines that draw the civilization and the rest of the less fortunate forward, to have more kids or suffer some penalties. We could of course be shocked and outraged by these fascist methods, thanks to Mr. Hitler who made the subject of eugenics a taboo, and just wait for evolution to do its thing. The price of that inactivity is steep, because it can ultimately result only in an Idiocracy-type social disintegration and africanization of the western society. This do-nothing method would ultimately result in a situation that is even worse than the aforementioned genocide, but since it's a result of inactivity rather than active choice, it seems to be more acceptable in the minds of people whose brains are not really much more advance than an average chimpanzee's one, which translates to the majority of people today.
An interesting paradox lies in the fact that the thing which enables idiots to thrive and multiply is the very thing that they lack, or the high average intelligence of non-africans to be precise (http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf). Social state amplifies that distortion even further, by explicitly encouraging those people to have a higher procreation rate than the rest of the population through subventions for the minorities, less fortunate, etc. So while capable people are wasting their time and lives sitting in offices from dawn till dusk and catering to corporate cargo cults, carefully planning their 0.5-child families in the few hours they have left for worries of potential resource shortage, the incapable spend their days pounding and procreating without any plan or forethought, being hindered only by police arrests or drug overdoses.
Through most of human history, those people would ultimately die of hunger, but the only problem they have today is the fact that their Playstation is one generation older than the one in possession of their richer neighbors and that they don't spend their vacations in tropical paradises (most likely because they can't even find them on the map). Living in such mild relative poverty is not really the most pleasant way to live, but it is most certainly not life threatening. And the only thing genes care about is whether they'll transfer to the next generation, rather than worrying about the completely irrelevant subject of the well being of their carriers.
The problems of such an unstable system can already be felt today, and they manifest themselves in ever higher taxes and resource theft from people who are the primary creators of capital and the workhorses of the economy. These resources are transfered to sustain those who are basically incapable of surviving by themselves, whether it's dementia-stricken retirees with one foot in the grave who didn't feel the need to procreate considering the state-guaranteed financial safety for the elderly, or borderline retarded creatures who procreate not to make the future capital creators but an exponentially growing horde of welfare addicts.
Extrapolating these processes gives a very clear picture of the future - the capable and competent will become a small enough minority that the state simply won't be able to tax them enough in order to feed the rapidly growing bulk of the incompetents, and the system is bound to break at one point. When that happens, and when the hordes of idiots realize that they'll end up being hungry and on the street, we're about to enter the aforementioned African scenario. Will the human species recover? Through a few centuries or millenia, most likely yes, because natural selection which favors intelligence will resurface in a new and dangerous world. What we can pray for is that we now, or at least in the next iteration of civilization, finally accept eugenics as the only non-bloody solution to keep the high level of culture and society which we enjoy today.
