Some species members care for each other. Humans obviously (some anyways), even lions I think have been known to provide food when another has broken teeth or something.
Apes feed and care for their elderly. When the old ape decides it’s time, it will go off alone into the jungle to die
I like to tell my Republican father we’d both be classified legally blind and on the welfare he hates so much if optometry wasn’t around. Helps put it in perspective for him how some people just “lose” the life lotto and need help to live in the same world as able-bodied folks.
Remember, your only job as far as natural selection is concerned is to have offspring and have them survive long enough to repeat the cycle. Old people with bad eyesight just have to be able to keep the kids and grandkids alive.
Don’t even need to be old. Don’t need to be able to see that good to know the red blotch that smells like the good berries is probably the good berries, and the antelopeish splotch might be a good thing to poke with your pointy stick of choice.
Bad eyesight could have a positive effect on generating offspring because you can’t tell how ugly your partner is. Or that about 30% of the time you aren’t having sex with your partner but someone else with poor eyesight instead.
You’d be having sex with a sneaky fucker
I remember maybe a decade or more ago some enterprising gent made a glasses design with some kind of resin in the lens, so the wearer could adjust the lens thickness to fit their needs. Nobody would back his invention so he created a non-profit to fund these glasses for the developing world. I’d love to know what happened to it because its still something I care about supporting.
Wow, that is a very cool concept. I, too, would like to back this.
you know whats even weirder? Some dude somewhere realized that lenses were a thing, and realized that your eyes were also just a glorified lense. And that theoretically you could just put a lense over a lense to fix the bad lensing of the lense. And it fucking worked.
Natural selection my ass.
Legend has it that it started with an old drunk man that decided to hold beer bottles to his eyes.
i dont know about that one to be honest.
Would be pretty funny though.
The “traditional” story (the one that “seems most likely” because we don’t really know) is that some kids were playing with discarded warped glass at a glassmaker’s shop and ended up with a magnifying glass or rudimentary telescope. Enter the simultaneous invention of the telescope in multiple places (very likely it wasn’t any one person in particular), Galileo starts using it for scientific stuff, now they’re making lenses on purpose. Old nearsighted lensemaker looks through it, maybe some charts or a book on the table, all of a sudden they can see well. Attach to frame. Glasses.
this seems much more likely, i like this one.
My eyesight is atrocious. One time I was out in a notable windstorm, I stumbled, and my glasses got ripped off my face. I would have been absolutely fuckered if I’d been alone. They’d gotten blown under a car and I never would have found them by myself.
Every time I have a migraine (or when I take my daily preventative. or whenever I notice the anti-migraine coating on my glasses) I consider how long it’ll take someone to put me out of my misery once the apocalypse shows up. Can’t say I’ll be super useful whenever I’m forced to be in a dark/quiet room for a day or so before I can function again.
Being seriously evaluated for Sjogren’s Syndrome currently. Went to a rheumatologist for joint pain and found out that my chronic eye pain and dry eyes is a big indicator of a problem. I thought it is because my eyesight is shit and I look at screens constantly
Do you have recurrent corneal erosions?
Natural selection hasn’t really applied to humans for thousands of years. We arguably beat nature when we created civilizations. Which is partly why some of these less than ideal genetic traits go unchecked now in the population.
Evolution and natural selection never stops, we’ve only changed what the selective pressures are.
True. I was thinking of the selective pressures of nature, but there are absolutely still self imposed selective forces acting on our species.
And even those self-imposed selective forces are ever-changing and vary quite wildly from context to context across the globe and across the socioeconomic spectrum. Modern human evolution is really fascinating.
Fascinating but terrifying to think that natural selection is probably now pushing humans to be good little office drones rather than survivors
That’s only true if people that work in offices reproduce at a higher rate than the general population, and I’m not entirely sure that’s the case. If anything, societal trends have shown that in more developed countries where office work would be more common people are having fewer kids and populations are starting to decline.
It doesn’t have to do with civilisation, but with group compassion. In fact, civilizations tend to care less if somebody starves to death on the streets because their eyes are not performing well enough to earn money…
That’s really not true at all though. Look up “Food Pantries in my area” and see how many places offer food in your area. The blind man would qualify for lifetime disability checks. Food stamps are a thing, charities and churches do this kind of work as well. My city has an emergency rent program and there are, of course, homeless shelters and soup kitchens as well. It’s really that society’s mechanism for meeting the needs of the hungry are part voluntary (charity) and part automatic with entitlements (not a bad word!) and sometimes people fall through the cracks.
This is why getting people connected to resources is such a big deal.
That and a bunch of reasons
but mostly the bunch of reasons
God made you that way, and she doesn’t make mistakes. Think about it.
Hail Satan
God doesn’t exist.
Then who will I blame for all of life’s problems?
He seems to have left a test foreskin on the deployment build.
That’s tamper resistant packaging. You’re supposed to remove that before use.
I’ve always found it curious that a religion that hated women so much would make a ritual out of a genital mutilation that makes men last longer.
I’m assuming that’s a side effect. Looking it up it seems to have started because the people of the time believed it reduced transmission of STDs and that it lessens the urge to masturbate.
I don’t need it to be night to realise that. I have -13 on both eyes, near-sightedness (not sure about the correct terminology in English). I see clearly for about one centimetre right by the tip of my nose, everything closer or further than that is a blurry and fuzzy mess. To use my phone without glasses I have to press it against my nose and can only see about half of the screen width clearly.
Oof I’m circa -10/-11 and that’s rough enough. I’d say an inch vision not a centimeter for me.
Do you have an option for eye surgery?
I did it with -8/9 R/L and they sit at -0.5/1 diopter now nine years post LASIK. Best decision I’ve ever made.
I’ve seen videos of eye surgery, no thank you I’m happy with my glasses and contact lenses
I’ve seen videos too. LASIK with double laser is the least intrusive. Pop a Xanax and fifteen minutes later it’s over.
I was enjoying the light show a lot. Very interesting experience and would do it again in a heartbeat if needed.
The other issue is I’m pretty sure it’s hugely expensive isn’t it?
It’s also not risk free. There are tons of YouTube videos talking about people’s bad experiences with it including possible side effects, some of which are a dealbreaker for me like a mouse cursor having starbursts. No thank you, I will take my glasses over that. I’d never opt for eye surgery unless medically necessary.
I think they just meant night time is when people remove glasses, so that’s when you notice the difference 😎
20 years ago I was injured in one eye. Without an operation it would have left me going slowly blind. The operation was invented maybe 20 years earlier.
Both my eyes had a cataract at a quite early age. Artificial lenses where invented AFAIK 50 years ago. The new lenses even correct my shortsightedness and astigmatism!
So if I had lived only 50 years earlier I would be blind on one eye and quite possibly without a lense or at least seeing really foggy on the other. Now I am sitting here with - 0.5/-1 and otherwise great eye sight.
There are no words how grateful I am for the wonders of modern eye medicine.
I’m so glad you have your vision!
The first successful organ transplant was in 1954.
Transplants weren’t often super successful until the development of Cyclosporine in 1982.
Similar thing happened to my dad. He was slowly going blind from cataracts, like he couldn’t even make out the dinner table in front of him. He just wasn’t mentioning it until it became untenable.
Then we found out there’s a free surgery to fix it, and now suddenly he’s got clear 20/20 vision at almost 80! He’s got better vision than I do lol
Just make the world think they are blind too. Just like anything else.
You would not have ruined your eyes in the first place back then because no evil tablets and other artificial garbage bad for the eyes
… Bad eyesight has existed for all of human history. It’s far from a new thing.
We have discovered nearsightedness is caused by a lack of sunshine during childhood. The amount of bright light you’re exposed to determines when your eyeballs stop growing/adjusting and if you don’t get enough you end up near-sighted.
That’s a factor sometimes, but plenty of people are just genetically nearsighted.
My eyes were shot long before tablets were ever a thing
I have an astigmatism in both my eyes.
