Help - my brain isn't big enough!

A number of recent stories and radio phone-in programmes have brought to my mind, again, the issue of rights and responsibilities. That is, that our societies ills often come down to people's insistence on their rights over and above their practice of responsibility.

I start with myself and recognise the malady most in me. I know when I start thinking that I have rights to certain things or to be treated a certain way, I'm on a slippery slope. I function best when I completely ignore whatever my rights might be and act instead from a position of responsibility. Largely I mean the responsibility to do the right thing in whatever situation I find myself.

The underlying theme of rights comes up time and time again. Richard Bacon hosted a phone-in last week on Five Live about whether owning a home was a right or a privelege. There was another debate on Jeremy Vine about service in shops - about whether we had the right to good service or whether the customer has a part to play in being polite to shop staff. The fat gene debate was peppered with references to individuals right to choose whether they are fat or stay fat, their rights to be treated on the NHS no matter what their personal culpability might be in their medical problems. Much as I hate to mention it, sick of the whole thing as I am, even the reporting of the Wills and Kate affair is liberally sprinkled with comments on the media's right to publish in the public interest and their right to privacy.

This is obvious maybe and not in itself worthy of comment. What my brain isn't big enough for is the question of where these rights come from within an evolutionary framework of survival of the fittest? Surely if evolutionary principles are correct, then the only right that matters is the right of the fittest to exert their influence and power over those that are less fit in order to maximise their survival chances. The rights of "lesser" individuals work against this direction of progress.

The above issues illustrate the point:
1. Houses. 'Fitness' is simply defined as money. If you can afford to buy a house then buy it. If not, tough. The rich enough to get on the ladder in the first place make it to the detriment of those that can't get on the ladder at all. These fit/rich get fitter/richer and the unfit pay them rent.
2. There's a tussle between the fitness of the customer because they have the cash in their wallet, and the power over accessibility to the products as the staff can choose to exclude these customers.
3. Fat people have trouble having kids (in some cases) and die earlier (in some cases). Darwinism says that's a good thing, because the thinner, fitter, longer-living specimens will gradually take over the gene pool and we will develop/evolve.
4. Royalty/Media. A true battle of the wills (sorry!). If the public support of the Royal Family outweighs the public interest to read every detail of their lives and see photos of them doing fairly mundane things like walking along the street with a cup of coffee, then there would be no stories/photos in the press. But it doesn't, so there are. Bad luck. Live with it. Give up your Royal position or learn to take it all even if it ends in death in a Paris subway or anonymous exile on a South African island paradise.

Let me say first off that I do not support any of these positions. Although my level of sympathy for each of them is not identical.

My point is simpler, which is where any rights come from that make us differ from this extreme Darwinistic standpoint. Did the right evolve? Are having rights really the prize for the fittest in evolution, even if the exercise of the rights works contrarily to weaken the gene pool? If so, how evolved does a being have to be to get the rights - why do we stop at chimps?

I prefer to forget rights and instead just try to do the right thing.
So I'll buy my house if I can afford to but also contribute time or money or both to homeless shelters or building projects in the Third World. Providing a suitable but not excessive home for my family doesn't have to be to the detriment of everyone else.
It's the right thing to do to treat everyone politely, as you would want to be treated, no matter what job they do or how much they get paid, or whether they are from Warrington or Warsaw. It's also OK to complain if they don't give good service, in an appropriate manner.
I'll try to get and keep myself healthy, maybe even help or encourage others to do the same, and help to feed people that don't have enough to live on.
I'll leave the Royals alone to live their lives, as I would want to be left alone. The country would be a culturally and touristically (and therefore economically) poorer place without them so they earn their keep and some privacy when they want it. I won't buy the papers that go to excess, nor click on the stories on the web - both of which fuel the idea that I'm interested in the rubbish that's produced in the name of public interest.

The closest I've come across to an explanation (appropriate credits...you know who you are) was that as we evolved we invented religion as a means to sustain the evolution of society/community. While we have now evolved far enough not to need religion any more, the principles of treating each other well (best embodied in the Christian tradition) still help to maintain our society and to enable further evolution. They are therefore worth keeping and encouraging, just without the religious context for them.
While I follow this argument, I still don't understand the natural consequences of this which appear to me to be counter-evolutionary. Because society protects the weak, enables them (us?) to procreate and live longer, it therefore stops or slows the relentless march towards a super-race with an ever narrower genetic make-up which approaches "perfection".
Maybe society through medical developments helps us to eradicate the "weakness" of the weak, thus making the gene pool stronger over time, including being stronger for being more diverse.

I think a field trip is called for. I'll need to demonstrate how most people live on a higher plane. I'll visit a fast food restaurants in the most deprived areas of every major UK city and rudely ask the fat people - preferably early teenage girls with a number of kids in tow and wearing Burberry - what they think of the influence of the print media in the Royalty vs Republicanism debate with specific reference to the now defunct relationship of William Windsor and Katherine Middleton.
Hopefully I'll get some polysyllabic answers and make it back alive...