Confronting Friends and Family

[Aractus]

A species to reproduces asexually is more vulnerable to parasites, or to environment changes. Sexual reproduction combines alleles and produces individuals who can adapt more easily, and therefore possibly survive longer and have more offsprings.

That theory, as far as I'm concerned, has been pretty much disproven. You can't account for the cost of sexual reproduction due to survivability factors. In fact, the only thing that sexual reproduction produces that is of any real benefit in this scenario are "robust genes", but that in itself doesn't account for the cost of sexual reproduction. The theory I "most agree" with regarding why we have it is the fact that sexual reproduction is social and encourages the mate to care for the vulnerable child. But it's still not enough to account for sex because you need a very complicated and intelligent organism for this to be of benefit, and there are a lot of species that do not benefit from their mate providing any external material support.

Having only 50% of your species reproduce instead of 100% is a hugly significant change.

Talking about "interests" is a biased way to approach evolution: it's an implicitly theleological approach. You implicitly assume that evolution has a purpose and from that you infer that it has a design.

That's not my argument at all.

Every hypothesis that introduces an unnecessary element, like your hypothesis of a "design" behind evolution, can be labeled as "msyterious force".

I never said that. I said that what we generally label as evolution is just a function/feature of the system, it is not the system. The system would predict the element of evolution to feature prominently, it would also predict a very diverse range of species, and a very rapid growth rate of evolution, etc.

I'm sorry, but your argument is incoherent. You tried to prove that our universe is special because it sustains carbon-based life. When I showed you that this is a biased, groundless assumption, you backtrack and say the universe is special because it's the only one that exists (another biased assumption).

You've misunderstood my argument. We only have one universe, whether or not you could introduce another atom into our own universe to replace carbon, we still just have one universe. Life is built on the properties inherent in the design of our universe. Our universe doesn't just allow the right "rules" we need of crystallography and carbon, but it also produces the life-enabling stars such as our sun to form; and planets that can support life such as ours to form; and allows life to self-start somehow; and allows evolution to take place and be rapid; ... etc.

Even if you have a multiverse (which we don't), all that gives you is another layer of complexity. It would simply mean that at the beginning of my list above "Our mulitverse has the right properties to produces a universe that's just right like ours, ..." It doesn't make the "design" of the universe any less wonderful or unique or special.