Comment Re:Death and Selection (Score 1) 70
Not if they allow you to help your children and grandchildren survive after they're born.
Not to mention your extended family, with whom you share many genes. Or species. Or a related species. Or a species that you and your conspecifics depend on to survive. Or something even higher up on the taxonomic hierarchy. Or life as a whole, with whom you share DNA itself.
Thinking of natural selection only exerting pressure on an individual organism or even species is way too limited. Whole blood lines, phyla and species disappear under new conditions, and others that survived those conditions reproduce. We share an enormous and probably unquantifiable percentage of our genetic structure with plants. Mutations can take eons to play out.
We're currently facing a future in which the conditions of our own existence, even the conditions of life, are threatened. The universe is about to make a selection for us if we can't adapt, and that adaptation might not be hard coded into our genes at all. The capacity for changing how we live in relation to nature could be, though. To live less destructively, for example.
If not, wish us luck.