Natural Selection

Yes, sorry

carry on

It's ok, just not exactly the right place or tie.

Right, that's just what struck me with that comment.  I'm stopping now though, because I realize that

You're right, it is a bad job of caring for our children.

I agree totally.  I am not as knowledgeable in the evolution debate as I am on the abortion debate, but I enjoy learning from both sides what you believe through discussions like this

Yeah, chime in any time.

I will do that if I think I have anything valuable to say

I would say evolution actually favors people who don't abort, as people who abort don't pass on their genes and people who don't abort have more kids to pass on their genes. Not saying that abortion is moral, just that if you're against abortion evolution favors you.

assuming that you are passing on good genes to help the species.  If you are a 'weakling' or whatever, then would they favor you?

Evolution favors organisms producing any offspring over organisms producing none at all.

What about if two people have a disease and it is passed on, like, that makes them weak or something. Should those people die?

I'm not saying that evolution is moral or that humans should do nothing about it. Of course we should everything we can for everyone. But in nature the odds of them surviving would be lower yes 

Ok.

So, why haven't we seen anything evolve in this little space of time, even just a little?

Humans caused wolves to evolve into dogs during just the previous couple thousand years. Bacteria can take months to evolve resistance to certain antibiotics.

That's micro evolution. That's the one point of evolution that is capable of being studied using th scientific method. Why haven't we seen something evolve new?

When I referred to our species, I had in mind a period long before we became modern, civilised humans. It's fair to say that we haven't been exclusively subject to the forces of natural selection for thousands of years.

Well, we have been exactly as subject to them as before, but the human interaction with the environment has become very complex.

The way I look at it is that in the human world, non-genetic information that propagates over space and time has become far more important. This information facilitates all sorts of interactions with the environment with no genetic basis, all which changes the environment dramatically, with many effects on fitness. The rate of development of non-genetic information has become extremely high.

In the living world in general, not much information is propagated far in time or space except genetic information, I think it is fair to say.

Members of our species gave up their hunter-gatherer lifestyles & became settled, relying on agriculture to sustain themselves in the Neolithic period. I believe the first large-scale communities were established around 5000 to 6000 years ago?

It's hard to believe that those settled 'townsfolk' were subject to the same forces of natural selection as their distant ancestors, who hunted large prey with little more than flint arrows & spears?