These questions and objections are touched upon in many parts of the sequences (the series of blog posts which seeded LessWrong, and which were written to address questions like this specifically). In your case, I'd recommend reading almost all of those posts, as they were targeted precisely towards these sorts of objections. That's a lot of reading, though; if you want specific answers to the questions you posed, then it sounds like you may be interested in the evolution mini sequence (which responds to the claim all we can hope to do is "express evo...
The reason "the task of designing values and institutions is complicated by selection effects" is because that design is not very effective. Everyone makes this way to complicated. Life is a complex adaptive system: a few simple initial conditions iterating over time with feedback. The more integrated things are, the more, and more effective, emergent properties. As Alex Wissner-Gross and others suggest, you don't really design for value: large value is an emergent property. Design the initial conditions. But we don't have to do that: it's alread... (read more)