Tolwyn: fallen hero or villian?

I don't admire him for the bad things he did but then again I do admire him for every thing we did in the Kilrathi war even the bad because then the Confederation was fighting to survive and in that case certain things need to be done for the better of the Confederation.
 
I admire Admiral Geoffrey Tolwyn.

Whether this is just due to Malcolm McDowell's portrayal of him, but there is something that endears him to me. His sense of purpose and order. Truth be known, it was this sense of purpose and order that WAS NEEDED after the Kilrathi War. The transitional times needed a strong hand to guide them. However of course, his ends, no matter how lofty, could not justify the means.

He is a tragic figure, however his good side does espouse many likeable traits. Loyalty, Order, Discipline. All elements we need in a society, especially in OUR world TODAY. The problems that Tolwyn had to overcome were mainly due to the ineffective political system. However, as ineffective democracy (if you can call it that) is, it is overall the best system still.

Tolwyn recognized that the military had to retain control over these transitional times. The economy was in disarray. It needed something to allow it to grow again. What better than to construct more military vessels? Society was crumbling into anarchy. What better than to give it purpose to fight again? There was method in his madness.

However, what he failed to realise is that as Raptor said, with diversity comes adaptability. As humans no doubt show, with our ability to adapt comes our greatest strength.
 
Originally posted by Bob McDob
Really? I don't remember any flames the last...three times this topic was brought up, though it did eventually devolve into rambling about Nazis...but LOAF says all topics on the web eventually turn into ones about Nazis, so there! :D

Besides, if they didn't want us talking about it, why didn't they just ban the topic?

[Edited by Bob McDob on 07-14-2001 at 21:32]

Well, that's one of those actual net rules... I forget what it's called, but it states that all discussions always become about Hitler or somesuch <G>

We can't very well ban people from talking about Tolwyn, though, can we?
 

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;



TC
 
Originally posted by Napoleon
I admire tolwyn greatly just not after FC.

Also Raptor, you are essentially wrong and correct. Your number 2 statement is right on. your number 1 statment is flawed because evolution is towards traits that are benificial so to remove the generally negative traits like genes for cancer, stupidity (ie low iq), and other generaly "bad" characteristics would have no negative effect on evolution. Everybody would not be the same, would you say decker and blair are the same? no yet they both survived the bugs (not nephilim, the disease).

Actually, evolution has nothing to do with "good" and "bad" traits (which is why I have so much trouble swallowing the idea of a "perfect" gentoype) but rather selects for those traits which are most benificial for *that particular envoirnment at that particular time*.

To go back to the example of the sickle cell trait I gave earlier, sickle cell anaemia is generally a very limiting condition to have. It means that you can't get oxygen to your cells properly, and your fingers and toes tend to rot off because the deformed blood cells tend to clog the small capillaries in your extremities. In high malaria countries though (Africa, parts of South America) the sickle cell trait is a godsend, because it gives close to perfect immunity against malaria. The malaria parasite spends part of its replication cycle in red blood cells, but it can't do that in the sickle cells. In those countries, what would normally be considered a "bad" trait actually gives you a much higher chance of staying alive, and is present in the poulations of those countries in much higher numbers than in the West. It's an adaption to that envoirnment, which is what evolution is all about. If at sometime in our past, someone had decided the sickle cell trait was "bad" and purged it from our gene pool, then there would be no possibilty of adapting.

That's what I mean about variety in the gene pool. The larger the range in your gene pool, the more differant options that evolution has to select from, and the higher the probability that there will be a part of our population that can survive anything the universe throws at us. Species with limited gene pools have trouble surviving and thriving, a good example of which is the cheetah.

The bottom line is that if you can guarantee that the enviornment you're going to be in is going to stay exactly the same for the rest of your history, which would be over thousands of years on dozens or hundreds of differant planets, then having all your people of the same gentoype might be a good idea. If you can't though, and I don't see how anyone can predict everything that we're going to face for the rest of our history, then it's a mug's game. All it would take was one virus, one toxin that everyone was vulnerable to, and you have no ability to adapt to it. Goodbye human race.

Also another "good" thing about removing a large portion of the population is the fact that while close inbreeding does create large ammounts of defectives or culls it also leads to more rapid aquision of traits and faster evolution. So to remove a large portion of the population would generally allow this to take place more so than with a larger population. This is why I hold that human evolution has been effectivly stopped, we all outbreed so much that characteristics do not have the chance to be aquired.
Finally, tolwyn was just doing what nature would have done if not for human interferance. We through technology, (killing snakes and other deadly animals, creating shelter, not having to hunt, medicine, ect ad nauseum) have stopped the survival of the fittest struggle to reproduce. Any human without a serious defect can reproduce and often. I am nearsighted, and while I don't see this as a cardinal trait I know that if I didn't have modern inovations I would have died when I was 12 from not being able to see any potentiall threats. So if you look at it that way tolwyn was just doing what MUST be done for human evolution as well as what WOULD have been done already. Though i must admit it would have been much more acceptable and moral to render those inferior people infertile to provent them from breeding rather than kill em

If this were true, then a whole lot of traits that exist today wouldn't exist at all. Nature had thousands of years to work on us before we learnt even such basics as making fire, and even more time before we had the rudiments of the modern medicine or nutrition or sanitation. If evolution was really programmed to "weed out" defects, then everyone who was prone to any kind of inheirited disease (sickle cell trait, thalassemia, cancer, you name it) should have been eliminated long before we got to the stage before we could do anything about it.

The thing to realise is that there is no "plan" to the evolution of the human race. Nature doesn't have some blue-print of the "perfect" human that she was working towards, one that we rudely interrupted. Rather, everytime we're in a new envoirnment, she starts over again, to produce the people best suited to *that* envoirnment. The idea of a perfect human is a fallacy, because what is perfect in one situation is imperfect in another. Take the melanin that gives some people dark skin, for example. When humans originated in Africa, having lots of melanin protected against skin cancer and cataracts, and was selected for. When some humans moved to colder climates, the melanin made them less able to absorb the weaker sunlight there for the synthesis of Vitamin D, which in turn made their bones weak and brittle. For these people, dark skin was a disadvantage, and so it was selected against to produce fair skinned people.

To sum up, nature doesn't go towards any one fixed goal in our evolution, eliminating weaknesses and defects as she goes. Instead, everytime we're in a new and dangerous situation, she reaches into the gene pool and selects the traits that are best suited to survive in that situation. The more variety in our gene pool, the better chance that nature has of finding a match. Lessening the range in our gene pool, as Tolwyn tried to do, doesn't do what nature would have done any way, but rather the opposite. By fixing us into someone's idea of "perfect" genes, you actually sabotage any cance we have of adapting and evolving.

Best, Raptor
 
Originally posted by Raptor
By fixing us into someone's idea of "perfect" genes, you actually sabotage any cance we have of adapting and evolving.
Adaptation and evolution are different things. Humans will always adapt; nothing can stop what must be done. All creatures adjust themselves to their surroundings, as well as make efforts to adjust their surroundings to themselves, and it has nothing to do with genetics.

I doubt, however, that we will ever really evolve any further physically. It's simple, random mutations occur in a species' DNA over long stretches of time. If those mutations make the species' rate of reproduction increase, they stay. If they are a failure, the creatures that have them generally don't stick around too long.

Society has effectively halted any further evolution that might have occurred.

A lot of people say that in the future, people won't have any hair anymore, that we'll have evolved it out. That's a fallacy. A complete lack of body hair would offer no competitive advantage, mostly because we're no longer competing. In fact, it might prove to be a problem, since ugly no-hair people couldn't get h0t dates.

We stopped our own evolution long ago. Tolwyn's tactics would've achieved nothing more than death. Now if I could only get my hands on some of those bombs... you couldn't imagine how many people I'd program out of existence.




[Edited by Frosty on 07-15-2001 at 08:07]
 
Please keep the bioweapons away from Frosty.

Going back to the original question, is Tolwyn a fallen hero or a villain? He's a human and therefore both.
 
Originally posted by Dak
Going back to the original question, is Tolwyn a fallen hero or a villain? He's a human and therefore both.
Wow, I love the psuedophilosophical statement at the end. He was a complete lunatic and a criminal. The Tolwyn who lead the Black Lance was not the same man who served Confed during the war. That man died and the newer, creazier Tolwyn took his place. Sorta like Darth Vader.

I never liked the jerk anyway, I'm glad they put him down.
 
Originally posted by Raptor
Second, Tolwyn's methord is flawed in that it kills off people if they even have one "bad" gene. Someone who might be a brilliant fighter pilot or marine or a great weapons scientist would be killed even if the trait they had didn't in any way impair the work they did. That's totally differant to the way natural selection works, which selects for the organism's *overall* fitness to survive, the *sum* of all their genes. That means you're going to lose massive amounts of talent in every sector of human activity, and hoping that that this talent is still going to be replicated the much smaller population you have left. That's a hugely wastefull way of going about improving the population.

As evidenced by the fact that Sosa, who was a very capable officer and definitely an asset to the BW, would not have survived the genselect virus.

-The Gneech
 
Tolwyn was a tragicly flawed character. He lost his wife and children very early in the war, and then was consumed in the fighting the war involved. The war stretched on for most of his life and he knew nothing else but the balance of power in war.

Humans are creatures of habit and enviroment. Tolwyn's habit was winning at any cost, even sacraficing hundreds upon hundreds of people to further the Terran war effort.
Enviroment was what drove Tolwyn: the War never seemed to end, so why stop?

Consider the fact that war boosts economy, usually brings a nation together and creates jobs and that Tolwyn was finally going back to the one thing he knew how to do, he justified it as "Correct". Sure, people would die, but that would continue to happen as dying is the perfection of humanity.

Keep in mind, if Tolwyn didn't orchestrate the Black Lance and the Border World's conflict into existence, he would be sitting back home in England sipping scotch all day. That's not a proper retirement for "The Confederations finest fighting admiral" now is it? He needed something much like you or I need to have a job. Not only to get money to pay the bills but to have something to do. Something to gripe about, to trade stories about. Imagine how full an autobiography by Tolwyn would be? A single campaign could take up 200 pages easily. Why? Because Tolwyn was a master at what he did and unlike many people, myself included, he knew what his purpose was in life and what he was good at, what his calling was. His calling was as a soldier and as a man who had the weight of sacrafice on his back.

His rationalization makes sense to all of us, I think, even though (it seems) most of us do not condone it. The fact that it makes sense though, means that we have a bit of what drove Tolwyn to that, in us as well. Don't go throwing stones in your own glass house and calling Tolwyn a villian, considering the fact he saved humanity more times than we'll ever know.

How many people did Tolwyn toss aside for the sake of the war effort? Not many in comparison to the number of lives spared. Humanity lived on because of his effort in the war.
They, as the Confederation he saught to protect with his own life many times by flying into a fight, owe him more than they gave him.

Tolwyn cracked toward the end, because the one thing that defined him was taken away: Conflict. He had no idea how to live without something to occupy his interests. No more destroyer groups or fleet carriers to make remember his place in life. Without a purpose, he had nothing and refused to sit idly while the galaxy passed him by. He made a war, which in many respects is a terrible thing but war is nessessary. The old idea that "Fighting solves nothing" is complete BS. Fighting solves everything, as it can clearly define a winner and loser. America lost Vietnam, though we hate to say it, and we also kinda went screwy during Korea. But WWII shows what a country at war can produce and thats what Tolwyn was going for.

In the end, Tolwyn was only asking for his purpose back, his reason to live. He found it, and was punished (I believe, too severely). I find myself lucky that I'm sure my direction into film score won't take me down the sad, lonely road that Tolwyn treaded in the end. But I find myself very fortunate that he did, as he showed me what a martyr truely is.

As I'm sure you noticed, he was also my favorite character in WC, so perhaps I'm a bit baised. But calling anyone a clear-cut villian in the case of Tolwyn is incorrect. This is why the whole Professor X - Magneto conflict has streached out for so long: You don't know whos really right in their ideas. You could have peace and plateau with humanity and mutants living together or take a dangerous route and enslave humanity and watch mutants become the next stage in evolution. With Tolwyn, it was fight the war to the end, and then do what or continue fighting.

[Edited by LeHah on 07-15-2001 at 12:14]
 
woopsy, I editied my whole post, oh well it's not like you can't just run back to any of about twenty other tolwyn threads to get an idea of what my views are on this. This is getting a wee bit redundent by now.

[Edited by Dekkar on 07-15-2001 at 12:51]
 
Originally posted by LeHah
Tolwyn was a tragicly flawed character. He lost his wife and children very early in the war, and then was consumed in the fighting the war involved. The war stretched on for most of his life and he knew nothing else but the balance of power in war.

Humans are creatures of habit and enviroment. Tolwyn's habit was winning at any cost, even sacraficing hundreds upon hundreds of people to further the Terran war effort.
Enviroment was what drove Tolwyn: the War never seemed to end, so why stop?

He'd been fighting all of his life and didn't know how to cope with peace? I suppose this is one of the main differences between Tolwyn and Blair, Blair had fought enough fighting (even if was still in the military for Prophecy).
 
Well, Dak, you've been living all your life. Could you cope with slowly dying over a 3 year period?
 
LeHah, I was trying to agree with your points there.

Tolwyn fought so much that fighting became his life, and when the Kilrathi war ended he was essentially dead. Is that what you were saying?
 
Oh ok Dak.

Yeah, we're talking about a human being that lost everything earthly and human about him with the death of his family.

Do we even know ages or names of his wife and kids?
 
Originally posted by LeHah
Do we even know ages or names of his wife and kids?
Do we have to?

Yeah, we're talking about a human being that lost everything earthly and human about him with the death of his family.
I disagree... if we look at the novels, and Fleet Action especially (where Tolwyn invites all the people, who were to be part of his secret plan, to his house on Earth), Tolwyn is depicted as a lot more "human" character than in the games...

I don't have particular examples in my head, but I am of the opinion that that's the feeling we get from his conversations with key characters, about what the war has brought and taken away from men, and how it is developing...
 
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