this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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More humans in one place have a real positive benefit. That's why we congregate in office buildings and university centers, rather than spreading ourselves out as evenly as possible. And communities with large populations enjoy economics of scale that smaller that smaller, more diffuse populations can't take advantage of.
Genetic drift isn't significant on the span of decades or centuries, but it is still happening and will have consequences to population subgroups in tens of thousands of years.
And - as we've demonstrated with more manual efforts at selection - we can force the issue with technology. Modern corn and bananas are two classic examples of a species cultivated by human intervention. Modern methods of transportation and trade has given us record levels of miscegenation, producing enormous cohorts of the human population with combinations of biological traits heretofore unseen (mostly trivial and unremarkable in the moment, but wait another 10,000 years and we'll see what we get).
The pressures we've placed upon the global ecology through industrialization are taking their toll as well. But these have feedbacks that shape our own populations. As the pressures we exert rise (via pollution, climate change, terraforming, deliberate scientific gene tampering) the consequences on our populations become more profound.
Even then, having said all of that, there is no real "better" from an evolutionary perspective. There is surviving to procreate and not surviving, but you'll be hard pressed to name an existing species that hasn't figured that out. What we have in cognition is the ability to evaluate the consequences of our actions. We don't have any kind of measure for what direction we should aim, save in what we collectively choose to value.