Sir, – James Mackey (Rite and Reason, July 19th) contends that Richard Dawkins, and atheists more generally, argue that “survival of the fittest” should be a guiding moral principle. He seems to extrapolate this bizarre and completely mistaken idea from the fact that Dawkins, like most sensible people, believes that evolution by natural selection is a sufficient explanation for the existence of life, in all its forms, including humans.
How he gets from this to morality is a mystery. The fact that life evolved by natural selection has nothing at all to do with moral sensibilities, except that, in arguing against the need for a divine creator, it also argues obliquely that morality cannot be derived from such an imagined entity.
This certainly does not imply that the mechanism by which evolution works should be the foundation for the moral principles by which we should seek to live our lives. This painfully illogical non sequitur is at best a lazy misunderstanding and at worst a wanton misrepresentation. – Yours, etc,