Hi Bex

Good questions. Firstly you have to understand what ToE is, it’s not a manifesto it’s a scientific theory. It tells us how life evolves not how we should feel about that or react to that. We have minds that are capable of examining the world around us and deciding that human happiness is more important to us than survival instincts or evolutionary forces because, as you have said, if we were to take ToE as a manifesto we should indeed try to get rid of the weak not help them to survive and multiply but that’s not what ToE so that’s not how we should look at our lives.

Of course ToE does apply to us regardless of our fighting against it and we can use it to understand better how our genetics will behave given our current circumstances. ToE explains how bacteria will respond to our antibiotics for instance but more directly it predicts how our own genetcs will react to the way we behaving in saving the lives of so many people who would otherwise be removed from the gene pool due to their own genetic weakness. In ToE the range of variability in any species is constrained by it’s environment, malformed (even very slightly) individuals will be the first to die off so they will not reproduce, same for those individuals who have poor immunity. In our society we artificially keep so many people alive who would not have survived in the wild and the effect of this is exactly as ToE would predict, our genetic variability is increasing, genetic defects are accumulating and we suffer more and more from problems that would have been weeded out in wild living species. CTD documented this clearly when he listed the growing number of inherited genetic defects that afflict our species and those of our domestic animals for whom selection pressure has also been drastically reduced.

So what should we do with this knowledge? I for one believe that we must use it to understand what is happening so that we can mitigate the problems we are causing so that we can all live better healthier, longer, happier lives. We can use our understanding of how our genetics will behave to guide us in developing gene therapies or new antibiotics or genetic tests to aid in eliminating defects from our genes.

But we are still animals, more intelligent than most yes but still animals and the rules of ToE apply to us today no matter what we want to think and we ignore that knowledge at our peril.

So on to your specific points. Should we let the weaker among us die or should we actively kill them off? Personally I would hate to live in a world that did so so no I don’t believe that this could be part of the best possible world we could build for ourselves.

Animals will let the weaker of their kind die or even actively kill them off for a very good reason, in the wild there is not enough resources to support all of them so some are going to die anyway. Allowing the weakest individuals to survive and use up resources that could be better used supporting the healthier individuals will lead in the long run to more deaths than just killing off the failures at an early stage. From an animal point of view that makes sense but we don’t have to make those sorts of choices in the world we inhabit today, we can afford to support the weak, the deformed, the sick, the lame etc. As humans we understand that it could be us who was weak and I for one would not want to be killed off if I had the chance of some quality of life. So why wouldn’t we support these people while we have the resources to do so.

Now recognizing that human life and happiness has a value in and of itself we build laws to maximize it since there are people out there who don’t understand what ToE is and/or don’t understand that we, as humans can rise above nature and invent our own way of doing things, a better, more human, more dignified, happier way of living. Some people simply wouldn’t get it and so we as a society have to control them, to force them to conform to what is our best attempt at the best of all possible societies that we can come up with.

Do you agree with survival of the fittest and presevation of genetics?

Survival of the fittest isn’t something you get to agree with it’s just how the world works. We can counter it with our technology and we should but it still applies to us as we see in the rising rates of inherited genetic defects in our own line due to us saving the lives of people who would otherwise die and so fail to reproduce and in the constant battle we face between our technology and the resistance of bacteria and other pests to our chemical attacks on them. Our genetics are safe, they don’t need us to preserve them, if we are thrown back into the wild say by a global catastrophe which undoes our society the unfit will die out quickly and those left will be the fittest and natural selection will quickly bring us back to a fit wild state whether we accept it or not.

Should they be allowed to reproduce in your opinion? Or should they be made sterile or perhaps even killed off, to allow the so-called evolution of mankind to reach it's full potential?

It’s a fraught question. I’ve seen children of deformed parent’s who are born deformed. If their parent’s both suffer from a recessive trait they are 100% certain to inherit it. But these are human beings who have the same desires to reproduce that you or I do (I’m assuming that you do by the way as that is the norm though I know it’s not a universal). If we let them do so they inflict their condition on their children but if we prevent them from doing so we are denying them the joy of being parent’s. There is no right answer here. We should offer them alternatives, adoption, donors etc, if they are interested but I don’t think we should force such measures on them unless their condition is extremely cruel to the children. Our best hope is probably genetic therapies that could replace the faulty gene’s while persevering the rest of them so that these people could have ‘normal’ children which were still their own.

Because if it's a crime to do this in your opinion, how do you reconcile that with survival of the fittest, gene preservation and the evolutionary belief system?

That’s an easy one, as I said ToE is not a belief system it’s simply a description of how the world works. We don’t get to choose that but we do get to choose what we do about it. I think we should always apply humanistic principals to our responses to such questions and look for the solution that maximizes the sum of human happiness given the situation that we find ourselves in.

No humans are not just a set of instincts, we have brains that are far beyond that but then so do many other animals. Like our closest relatives in the animal kingdom we are self aware and we have an understanding of fairness. We can think abstractly and we can empathize with those we share this world with. Our’s minds are far more refined than theirs but we do share these traits with quite a few creatures on this plant.

Can you explain to me where evolution fits into this in the respect of actually explaining it from our origins? Rather than starting in the middle and assuming this as being an acceptable explanation. I realise that to an evolutionist, everything is attributed to evolution. But if in fact it's true, then it should easily be able to prove itself, instead of giving more question marks than answers.

What exactly do you want me to explain? Do you want me to explain where empathy comes from, where our sense of right and wrong comes from in an evolutionary paradigm?

Since everything has a purpose and begins with information and has an ending.

It does? I’d like to see you prove this? Before I run off trying to prove something that isn’t true in the first place for you can you prove to me that everything has a purpose? And that it begins with information?

[I]f it did begin with information, but from an evolutionary persepective, then from whence or from 'whom' did this information arise?

Information is the opposite of entropy. A very small, hot universe contains a great deal of entropy but as it spreads out and cools the amount of entroy per unit of space falls or put another way the amount of order/information per unit of space increases. That’s the second law of thermodynamics 2LoT applied to the big bang. 2LoT is a very well established rule. No one has yet been able to show anywhere that it fails to hold. Can you. If 2LoT is true order and information must arise in a universe that is rapidly expanding no god’s required.

Because chance does not contain purpose. And information is purposeful.

You’ll have to prove this one too. I see no reason to suspect that this is true. Purpose and information are related but not in the manner you are suggesting.

Sorry for all the questions, but I guess I'm rather curious as to how an evolutionist explains the human spirit, love, emotions and choosing a mate from love, rather than physical attributes for presevation and perfecting genetics. Though there are people who really don't see beyond this, most people eventually do.

What exactly is the human spirit?

Love is how evolution get’s people together to make babies and to raise them. When we were simpler creatures instincts could do the job but once we overcame our instincts with intelligence evolution had to find another way to motivate us. Love and sex drives are powerful motivators I’m sure you’ll agree.

Why do we choose someone who is not the perfect evolutionary choice? That too is a good question. Why does the female pea hen chose a male who has a big flashy tail regardless of how fit he is? None of us actually know how fit any other one of our kind is. Pea hens use a proxy for fitness that gives them on average a better chance of finding a good partner but they don’t mate for life so the choice is just about good genes and nothing more. Human babies take a long time to mature so the partnership has to last for quite some time to give the children a good chance. For humans nature had to find a way to motivate us to form long term partnerships. Lust is enough for pea hens but not for humans. Love is a long term thing at least it usually is.

Each individual of any species has the drive to reproduce, in a monogamous species the percentage who get to mate is far higher than in species in which mate choice is short term. As I said females can be far more picky if they only want the guy’s seed than if they want him to hang around for the long haul of raising kids. In the likes of sealions the many of the guy’s never get the chance to mate because the never make it to the top of the social pecking order. It’s a totally different dynamic in monogamous species where there are usually around a 1:1 ratio of male to female so unless some individuals give up the chance to mate there’s usually going to be someone around to mate with and ToE can give us some insights into the hows and whys of it if we just take the time to understand it.

All the best till next time Bex

Russell