So natural selection is now God?
Or is God natural selection?
Because a mutation that leads to people to have offspring has no effect. It’s just God?
Natural-selection does not have any teleological directionality (vitalism) which is why it produces such inefficient solutions to biological problems like malaria in the short-term (at least when there isn’t overwhelming selection pressure but that discussion is far too complex for NB).
It will, in the long-run, find a solution to malaria that isn’t pathological because eventually a series of mutations or a very good one will generate a non-pathological path to malarial protection – and then malaria will evolve resistance to that solution (it’s a constant arms race between organisms and the entities that infect them). But because natural-selection is a blind process it will in short time-periods simply select for whatever mutations that provide any protection even if they are essentially diseases – sickle cell, thalassemia, glucose-6 phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, haemoglobin-C and so on.
Those anti-malarial diseases exist as what we call evolutionarily stable strategies and their existence can be explained mathematically (evolutionary game-theory) but again that’s a discussion for a lecture not a forum. And they will continue to exist in populations affected by malaria until, by pure chance, one day a true biological solution appears whether in the form of a singe mutation or a series of them.
A well-documented case of this process of evolution in humans is high-altitude adaptation. Several human populations in South-America, East-Africa and Asia have lived at high-altitudes where there is a lower partial pressure of oxygen in the air for long periods of time, thousands of years. This is remarkable because to most normal people like you and I, living that high up in that hypoxic environment is well… impossible, or at least living long anyway.
These various groups have all evolved different biological solutions to the problem of low-oxygen at high-altitude. The ones that have lived there for the shortest period generally tend to have adapted to their environments by simple polycythaemia, i.e. they have an elevated number of red-blood cells in their bodies, which causes hyper-viscosity of the blood, a condition that puts you at elevated risk of various cardiovascular diseases and indeed – many of these people suffer much higher-rates of cardiovascular disease than would be expected given their lifestyle.
In this case, however, evolution has found a true solution to the problem of living at high-altitude for humans in the Tibetans. The Tibetan people do not have simple polycythaemia – instead they have about half a dozen mutations that relate to hypoxic physiology (in erythropoietin production, metabolic mutations in glycolysis and fatty acid oxidation and even DNA repair mechanisms). The Tibetan natives have a completely unique physiological response to hypoxia unseen in any other human population including the other human groups living at high-altitudes. As it turns out, the Tibetans are also the group that have lived at high-altitude the longest.
Or to put it more simply for some of the members on this thread – the Tibetans have unique and superior adaptation to high-altitude compared to other groups such as the Ethiopians and Andeans (who also have adapted to high-altitude living, in their own way).
Of course the reason why the differential exists is because the Tibetans and other high-landers are genetically isolated groups that do not inter-breed. If they were a inter-breeding population – the Tibetan genes for high-altitude adaptation would very quickly replace the less efficient genes of the other high-landers. And that is natural selection.
None of this seems like the work of a conscious entity, of course. Probably because it isn’t.