Evolving in Oz

One of the biggest problems I have with Darwinists is their tendency to take evidence that proves a trivial portion of their theory correct and assume that proves the entire theory correct. As a result, the plethora of evidence for, say, adaptation (e.g., wolves with thicker coats in cold climates, the peppered moths of England, etc.) is used to cover the paucity of evidence for large-scale evolution (i.e., species-to-species evolution, assuming “species” is ever defined by Darwinists, of course). To give an analogy, it is as if Darwinists are attempting to convict a man of first degree murder by proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is a jaywalker. But a bunch of adaptation doesn’t lead to evolution of species anymore than a bunch of jaywalking leads to murder.

One of the strongest arguments Darwinists use is based on the fact that many different creatures look similar to each other in some fairly foundational ways, including sometimes in the genome itself. Even Michael Behe (of Darwin’s Black Box fame) believes in common decent in part because of a broken gene that is found in both chimps and humans. The assumption is that if some feature is the same in two different population groups, they must have a common ancestor with that same feature.

It is certainly plausible to assume that common features indicate a common cause, and common decent is one possible way that that could occur (whether likely or not is a different issue). But it is by no means the only way. Indeed, a common environment could just as easily explain certain common traits. That is, suppose that a gene is mutated due to radiation in the environment, and two species have that same gene and share the same environment. There is a good possibility that the gene will be mutated identically in both populations simply because of the environment, and it has nothing to do with lineage.

Naturally, I’m not saying that’s what happened with the broken gene found in both chimps and humans. I haven’t studied that particular issue enough to know either way; but I do know enough to not assume ipso facto that commonality must require common decent. Indeed, there is a specific example of which I am familiar that demonstrates just how dangerous it is for scientists to dogmatically claim decent in such a manner.

It’s called the marsupials of Australia (they also exist here and there in South America and Asia, but they reign in Australia).

Marsupials differ from placental mammals in that marsupials will give birth to their young prematurely, and then the offspring will move into a pouch (called the “marsupium”) in females, and they be raised in that pouch until they are fully developed. In contrast, placental mammals carry their offspring to full term before birth. These differences result in some anatomical differences, mostly in soft tissue, between placental mammals and marsupial mammals.

That said, there are many marsupials that look virtually identical to placental versions of the same animal, as pointed out in this article:

In some cases, placental and marsupial mammals physically resemble each other: the pouched marsupial mouse and the harvest mouse, the marsupial mole and the common mole, the marsupial wombat and the marmot, the tasmanian wolf and the wolf.

The comparison between animals is such that, for instance, in the case of the wolf it is virtually impossible for the untrained eye to tell the difference between an Australian marsupial wolf skeleton and a European placental wolf skeleton.

Let us assume Darwinism is true for this argument. If we see a marsupial wolf that looks almost exactly like a placental wolf, we would immediately argue that this proves that marsupial and placental wolves had a common wolf ancestor that diverged into two lineages: one placental and one marsupial. And indeed, for a time, this is what Darwinists believed. Likewise with the marsupial mouse and the placental mouse: they too would have had a common mouse ancestor that diverged into two lineages.

But Darwinists must also consider the case of the wolf and the mouse together. The assumption is that since both are mammals (regardless of whether marsupial or placental animals are in view) then at some point each had a common ancestor that diverged into different lineages, one of which lead to the mouse line and one of which lead to the wolf line. Thus far, the Darwinist is not in any trouble.

The problem comes when he tries to handle both of these. The Darwinist needs to account for how both the wolf and the mouse diverged into marsupial and placental lines. It seems fairly logical to say that the differences between a marsupial wolf and a placental wolf are not as extreme as the differences between a wolf and a mouse (after all, even the untrained eye can distinguish between the skeleton of a mouse and the skeleton of a wolf despite not being able to distinguish between the marsupial and placental skeletons of a wolf). This would mean that, in order of precedence, the mammal lineage should have split into the mouse lineage and the wolf lineage before each branch then split into placental and marsupial lineages.

Yet that would mean that the marsupial split needed to happen multiple times. Not just twice, but there are about twenty such species that have marsupial members with corresponding placental members, and there are also several marsupial species that only exist as marsupials.

To make matters worse, even if we could stipulate that for some unknown reason, marsupials just happen to arise a lot in the fossil record, we also have to deal with the timeline. Australia and Antarctica broke off from Gondwanaland roughly 45-80 million years ago, according to which modern geological timeline you pick. As most of us have heard repeatedly, dinosaurs ruled the world until about 65 million years ago, and the only mammals alive at the time were small shrew-like creatures. This means if we assume Australia broke off only 45 million years ago, mammals only had 20 million years to co-evolve before those mammals on Australia were isolated from the rest of the world. If Australia broke off closer to 80 million years ago, we’d only have those shrew-like creatures to develop all the species of marsupials in Australia.

Which is it? Well, today most Darwinists on this issue believe all the marsupials in Australia have come from just one species: microbiotheria. In other words, Darwinists today believe that the marsupial/placental split only happened once. After that, placental mammals developed into the wide variety of animals that exist in Europe and North America, and the marsupial mammals developed into the wide variety of animals that exist in Australia and parts of South America. In the meantime, certain lineages just happened to evolve such that the Tasmanian wolf looks exactly like a European wolf to all but the trained observer. And the marsupial mouse looks like the placental mouse. And the placental flying squirrel looks like the marsupial flying squirrel. Etc, etc, etc.

Never fear though. Darwinists already know about this and have proposed an explanation! It’s called convergent evolution. Convergence is the idea that two organisms from separate species follow similar evolutionary paths due to identical environmental pressure. Thus, according to Darwinists, there was one species on Australia that also lived on the rest of the continents with mammal life. Because the environment was similar, the decedents of organisms on either side of the divide both evolved along similar pathways, to the point that the marsupial wolf, mouse, mole, and squirrel look almost identical to the placental wolf, mouse, mole, and squirrel.

Unfortunately, Darwinists don’t see how this undercuts their best evidence for common descent: the similarity of features. For you see, one broken gene that is the same in chimps and humans is proof of common decent, but having an entire skeleton that looks indistinguishable to another organism isn’t proof of common decent—it is proof of convergence. I would think that if the environment is sufficient to explain widespread morphologic similarities between marsupial and placental mammals, it must be sufficient to explain one broken gene.

Yet when you consider the vast difference between a mouse and a wolf, there is really no reason to think that an environment that would so alter the reproductive system of certain types of mammals—such that one becomes marsupial and one becomes placental—that that same environment would somehow “magically” zero in on the exact phenotype of the wolf or mouse. Indeed, on Darwinian principles alone, would this not actually suggest that given a shrew-like mammal on Earth, it was inevitable that wolf-like creatures would come about? Doesn’t all this suggest some kind of teleology? It certainly doesn’t seem to make sense from a process of random mutation followed by natural selection. That may get you the difference between placental and marsupial mammals, but it certainly cannot explain the existence of similar placental and marsupial wolves, given how far along the Darwinian lineage they each are from their shrew-like predecessor.

Natural Selection and the Gambler's Ruin

I mentioned in my comments with Mighty Pile the Gambler’s Ruin. The GR occurs when a gambler runs completely out of money. There are two aspects of the GR that impact our understanding of Natural Selection. First is the fact that if you are at a numerical disadvantage, then even if you have a statistical advantage in gambling you will often hit GR first simply because the other person can take “more damage” before he reaches it. Thus, just because one individual gains a favorable mutation does not mean that that mutation will be automatically chosen for due to the sheer number of competitors that the individual would have to compete with.

But more importantly is the fact that Natural Selection, in order to work at all, is an All-Or-Nothing proposition. That is, favorable traits must be selected for while unfavorable traits must die out. In one of his comments, Mighty Pile said:

Some traits DO confer an advantage to a particular organism and its progeny. While fit individuals certainly do die sometimes and unfit individuals certainly do live sometimes, the fit organisms would outcompete the unfit ones in large numbers. One antelope's chance vs another antelope's chance may be a 49%-51% split. But in a whole herd, the one that gets eaten will almost always be of the slower variety, or of the sick or injured variety. This is, of course, supposition based on logic. I don't know how I'd prove it right now; it seems obvious in any context I can come up with for it. The difference between fit and unfit would probably be very small most times, setting up a sort of tipping point situation. I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you, right?

In response, I pointed out that one would be foolish to wager everything he owned for a chance to win a billion dollars if he only had a 51% chance of winning it and a 49% chance of losing it. This did get me to thinking a bit further, however, and I developed the following.

Suppose you start with 100 individuals. Each begins with $100. Each wagers $100 in order to gain $100. The odds are 51% win and 49% lose each bet, but with the following stipulation: as soon as you hit $0, you’re out of the game. You cannot continue. This is important to mimic Natural Selection, because as soon as you die you can no longer reproduce. It’s over. So you need a final set point.

How long will it take for a person to reach $1,000 given this structure? And how many people will hit GR before that occurs?

I made up an Excel spreadsheet to show this to me (click here for graphic). It assumes a literal 51% - 49% split for each round (in other words, I don’t randomize the data; this is the “ideal”). The vertical axis is how much money people have; the horizontal axis is the number of rounds. The number plotted in each cell is how many people remain for each row (i.e., how many people have whatever money is in that row). The bottom line beneath the graph simply sums how many people remain (i.e., those who did not hit GR). The cell at the far right of the 0 line is the grand total of those who hit GR.

Thus, we begin with 100 people holding $100. After the first round, 49 people are bankrupt and 51 people have $200. In the second round, 51% of those 51 people (26.01) at $200 will gain another $100 for a total of $300, while 49% (24.99) lose $100 to go back to $100 total. For the third round, we again calculate each group: 51% of the 26.01 (13.27) at $300 will go to $400; simultaneously, 49% of the 26.01 (12.74) drop back to $200. In the meantime, 51% of the 24.99 (12.74) who dropped to $100 will gain $100 and make it back to $200. They combine with the 12.74 who lost $100 to drop down to $200 to make 25.49. Finally, 49% of the 24.99 (12.25) who were at $100 will go bust.

Note that unlike in real life (where a whole number of people either win or lose), these calculations are made with the decimal points from the previous numbers still intact. In fact, I used dependent formulas for each cell. If we were rounding before we did the math, the answers would vary slightly.

And the results: It takes 11 rounds for the first person to hit $1,000 (and that’s only if you round 0.58 up to 1; the line does reach in round 9, but the value would round down to 0). In the meantime, 75.93 people have gone bust. That means that in order to get one person from $100 to $1,000, 76 people have to go bankrupt. And that’s starting with 100 people. A 1% advantage does not provide much of an advantage at all under these circumstances.

Natural Selection falls to the same principal. Just because a favorable mutation may confer a 1% advantage onto an antelope does not mean that the antelope really has that much more of an advantage than other antelope. And I should point out that living systems are actually far more complex than even this illustrates.

The key to why this works this way is because the chart is capped at 0. Once you hit 0, it’s over. That provides a literal line in the sand that has a huge impact. Because in Natural Selection death is such a line in the sand, this demonstrates that even a 1% advantage holds no real benefit to the furtherance of a trait in the species.

In reality, survival rarely comes down to a single trait though. Chance encounters are almost always going to outweigh any mutational advantage of a single trait. Consider all the following that mitigate against the classical view of Natural Selection:

* An antelope is born with 1% more speed than any other antelopes who have been born. However, when the antelope is a newborn, he is not as fast as the adults. As a result, despite being 1% faster than all other newborns, he is still slower than the slowest adult; therefore, he remains a preferential target for predators. If he is near adults at the edge of the herd when lions attack, they will go after him rather than the adults. This brings to mind the second point:

* As Mighty Pile pointed out, there is an oft repeated joke that one need only be faster than the slowest prey when a predator attacks. This, however, ignores the fact that if you are faster than me, but you are five feet away from a hungry bear while I am a quarter mile away from the hungry bear, the bear will catch you before you can run far enough to surpass me and make me a target.

* Sometimes pure dumb luck happens. A ram may be the fittest ram ever, but if he slips and breaks his leg, he’ll be eaten. And accidents happen quite often in nature. And even aside from nature. A highly specialized and advanced snake in Baghdad might happen to get hit by a mortar round fired from an insurgent that was not intended to strike the snake, but did. Or a random lightning strike could kill an elk in the forest who was “superior” to the other elk. When it comes to random events, traits have no bearing on survivability. There is no survivability trait for bad luck.

* For that matter, the strongest bull may be cut down by a viral infection that attacks only strong animals, leaving the weak bulls alive. The weak bulls are “more fit” (by definition, since they survived) but once the infection runs its course the herd would have been better off with the stronger bulls.

* A mutation for greater intelligence might occur in a sheep that’s also the least hearty sheep in the herd. Despite the fact that this intelligence trait would benefit the herd as a whole, the sheep dies of an illness before reproducing.

So survival rarely is about any one trait anyway. Instead, to have the best chance at surviving, organisms need to have a wide range of traits, any one of which may or may not be relevant at any particular time. But some traits are mutually exclusive. Because evolution must be blind (in a materialistic world) it cannot predict which trait will be needed in the future. And because it cannot predict what is needed (after all, it is non-teleological; and furthermore, even intelligent agents like weathermen cannot predict what will happen in the environment tomorrow), the random forces of nature will far outweigh any slight statistical advantage that individuals in a herd have.

So the only way to have beneficial mutations that avoid the GR problem is if they grant a far greater than 1% chance upon the individuals (after all, think of mutations, which convey far more than a 1% disadvantage to the individuals and therefore are seen!), or if they occur more often than random mutations would enable them to occur so that more individuals get the trait (remember, we started the above graph with 100 individuals already having $100, and 76 of them went bankrupt before a single person reached $1,000; if you had 1,000 people to begin with, 760 would go bankrupt…but you’d have 10 make it to the $1,000 mark, so clearly having more individuals get the same mutation would help), or the mutation would have to occur in an individual that is already “more fit” due to other traits to begin with (and that brings up the converse: a detrimental mutation can occur in those who are “more fit” due to other traits and therefore be “selected for” simply because it’s riding along with the system; whereas a “less fit” organism might evolve a wonderful trait that cannot overcome the aspects that make it “less fit” and therefore that trait is not “selected for”).

That’s a lot of front-loading you need before you can get the system going. Living systems are far too complex to be affected greatly by any slight advantage in a single trait.

More on Natural Selection

It is rare that an anonymous commenter will write something worth responding to, but one such anonymous comment did occur here. Unfortunately, the other anonymous commenters went the usual path of obstruction. I will therefore first post the entire relevant comment so you don’t have to suffer, and then refute it.

Anonymous said:

Natural selection is really not such a hard concept to "get". I am no scientist, and yet I can see why a pack of wolves charging a herd of caribous will preferably go after the weaker individuals, hence reducing their chances to pass on their genes to the next generations. It’s a logical behavior motivated by the harsh requirements of their subsistence. (No need to invoke a mysterious force behind it.) Changing environmental conditions, including competition with other predators and preys (who themselves keep evolving) will keep changing the parameters of the equation, and lead to fortune reversals. For example, under certain conditions, it may be advantageous for a given species to become larger. Should the environment change (e.g., isolation of a population from the mainland), the opposite may become true. The fact that natural selection favors one evolution trend under certain conditions, and another (perhaps opposite one) under other conditions, hardly makes it irrelevant.

To go back to the moth example, maybe it’s true that natural selection will lead to the extinction of the slow white ones, given the evolutionary pressure they are facing (see the dodo for a real life example). But let’s not forget that it’s also natural selection that caused them to be slow and white in the first place. They are now at a disadvantage simply because something has changed in their environment. Being fast and dark is temporarily the winning combination of attributes, until something else changes yet again.

As for the relative stability of species, I would venture that fitness to a particular environment is always a matter of optimization under (many) constraints, and the capacity to adapt is one of critical components of success. Many species have become too "perfect" for their own good, and ended up extinct.

First off, I would agree that Natural Selection is not a hard concept to “get” but that is precisely because, as my original argument stated, Natural Selection is trivial. In fact, Darwinists play on their loose defining of this term to their advantage (and we see many examples of this in Anonymous’s post). But let us survey some of the popularist Darwinists. First, let us consult the glossary that Mark Ridley has in his textbook, Evolution to give us the starting framework (note, in all quotes that follow, the italics is in the original):

natural selection The process by which the forms of organisms in a population that are best adapted to the environment increase in frequency relative to less well adapted forms over a number of generations (Ridley, 2004 p. 686).

This leads us to look at the definition of “population” which is:

population A group of organisms, usually a group of sexual organisms that interbreed and share a gene pool (Ripley 2004, p. 687).

Compare this to the definition for fitness:

fitness The average number of offspring produced by individuals with a certain genotype, relative to the number produced by individuals with other genotypes. When genotypes differ in fitness because of their effects on survival, fitness can be measured as the ratio of a genotype’s frequency among the adults divided by its frequency among individuals at birth (Ripley 2004, p. 684).

Now these definitions are fairly dry, but they serve an important purpose. First, they are about as precise as you will ever see a Darwinist define the terms. But how precise is that? Look at the definition for Natural Selection once more. There is nothing in that definition that is inconsistent with Creationism. All Natural Selection is, according to Ripley, is when one population (which is a shared gene pool) increases in number (frequency) because it is the most adapted to the environment while maladapted organisms decrease.

And this is a problem for Creationism because…?

This definition will hardly do for the Darwinist to stake his claims. Let us therefore look at what Ernst Mayr wrote:

Almost all of those who opposed natural selection failed to realize that it is a two-step process. Not realizing this, some opponents have called selection a process of chance and accident, while others have called it deterministic. The truth is that natural selection is both.

At the first step, consisting of all the processes leading to the production of a new zygote (including meiosis, gamete formation, and fertilization), new variation is produced. Chance rules supreme at this step, except that the nature of the changes at a given gene locus is strongly constrained.

At the second step, that of selection (elimination), the "goodness" of the new individual is constantly tested, from the larval (or embryonic) stage until adulthood and its period of reproduction. Those individuals who are most efficient in coping with the challenges of the environment and in competing with other members of their population and with those of other species will have the best chance to survive until the age of reproduction and to reproduce successfully (Mayr 2001, p. 119).

First I must note that if it is true that “[a]lmost all of those who opposed natural selection failed to realize that it is a two-step process” it is equally true that Ripley failed to realize this. In reality, Mayr is synthesizing two aspects of Darwinism together and fusing it all under the term Natural Selection, which is improper. Only the last paragraph of what Mayr wrote actually deals with Natural Selection. That is, selection is a winnowing process; the “first step” Mayr proposes is actually a separate entity, namely chance mutation.

But what is most interesting about this quote is the fact that Mayr seeks to demonstrate that Natural Selection is “deterministic.” And this deterministic pressure is on every stage of the organism, from larva (or fetal) up through reproduction. However, just 22 pages later, Mayr writes:

Much of the differential survival and reproduction in a population are not the result of selection, but rather of chance. Chance operates at every level in the process of reproduction, beginning with the crossing-over of parental chromosomes during meiosis to the survival of the newly formed zygotes. Furthermore, potentially favorable gene combinations are undoubtedly often eliminated by indiscriminate environmental forces such as floods, earthquakes, or volcanic eruptions before natural selection has had the opportunity to favor specific genotypes (Mayr 2001, p. 141).

So which is it? Is it deterministic, or is it chance? Darwinists are hardly clear on this issue, so it’s no wonder their followers cannot speak cogently on it. One thing is certain: Natural Selection cannot be teleological!

Another widespread erroneous view of natural selection must also be refuted: Selection is not teleological (goal-directed). Indeed, how could an elimination process be teleological? Selection does not have a long-term goal. It is a process repeated anew in every generation (Mayr 2001, p. 121).

(Note that this quote on page 121 demonstrates that Mayr is fully aware that Natural Selection is only “an elimination process” and not his two-step process he claimed on page 119.)

So, while Mayr seeks to synthesize two aspects together under the term Natural Selection when it suits him, he is quick to keep them separate when it does not suit him to combine the ideas.

With this in mind, let us return once again to Anonymous’s comments. He said:

I am no scientist, and yet I can see why a pack of wolves charging a herd of caribous will preferably go after the weaker individuals, hence reducing their chances to pass on their genes to the next generations.

I assume that anonymous meant the reduction in chances to pass on genes to the next generation occurs for the “weaker” caribou and not the wolves that pursue them…

In any case, the language of this sentence requires us to ask an immediate question. What does this term “weaker” mean?

It is actually wrong for Darwinists to use the term “stronger” or “weaker” in describing organisms during the process of evolution. In evolution, we are only interested in one thing: the fitness of an organism. The fitness of an organism has nothing to do with ideas of strength (reread the definition provided above) but is only about reproductive success. Indeed, if it did refer to strength and weakness then Darwinism would be teleological after all. It would have a progression. Yet Gould points out:

Darwin waged such a long-standing internal battle over the idea of progress. He found himself in an unresolvable bind. He recognized that his basic theory of evolutionary mechanism--natural selection--makes no statement about progress. Natural selection only explains how organisms alter through time in adaptive response to changes in local environments--"descent with modification," in Darwin's words. Darwin identified this denial of general progress in favor of local adjustment as the most radical feature of his theory. To the American paleontologist (and former inhabitant of my office) Alpheus Hyatt, Darwin wrote on December 4, 1872: "After long reflection, I cannot avoid the conviction that no innate tendency to progressive development exists." (Gould, 1989 p. 257)

Therefore, it is quite improper for the Darwinist to use terms like “weaker” to refer to those who die out, for that term implies progress, which Darwinism cannot do. However, Darwinists constantly slip into this error.

So we see that what is really going on is that predators must go after those animals that are less fit. But how do we know which animals are less fit?

Well, fitness is defined as those animals that survive to produce offspring. So the only way to tell if an animal is less fit is if it dies before it produces offspring.

Of course, we could use a different term. We could say that those that die are “less adapted” to their environment. And how do we determine which organism is most adapted?

Adaptation is a completely a posteriori phenomenon for a Darwinian, that is, it is based on the inductive assessment of facts. In every generation, all individuals that survive the process of elimination are de facto "adapted" and so are their properties that enabled them to survive. Elimination does not have the "purpose" or the "teleological goal" of producing adaptation; rather, adaptation is a by-product of the process of elimination (Mayr 2001, p. 150).

This, however, leads to an immediate problem, one that Gould recognized even if Mayr didn’t:

Arguments that propose adaptive superiority as the basis for survival risk the classic error of circular reasoning. Survival is the phenomenon to be explained, not the proof, ipso facto, that those who survived were "better adapted" than those who died. This issue has been kicking around the courtyards of Darwinian theory for more than a century. It even has a name--the "tautology argument" (Gould, 1989 p. 236)

Note that Gould was a Darwinist and yet he made the same claims that I have made. If survival is the proof of adaptation, then we are left with a tautology. Gould then informs us of how we can avoid this problem:

In fact, the supposed problem has an easy resolution, one that Darwin himself recognized and presented. Fitness--in this context, superior adaptation--cannot be defined after the fact by survival, but must be predictable before the challenge by an analysis of form, physiology, or behavior. (Gould, 1989 p. 236).

Note first that we have to redefine the term “fitness” to no longer mean “The average number of offspring produced by individuals with a certain genotype, relative to the number produced by individuals with other genotypes.” No, now we define it as “superior adaptation” which is a rather convenient way to resolve a problem—define it away! But note even if we grant this, Natural Selection must therefore become “predictable.” That is, we must be able to predict beforehand “by an analysis of form, physiology, or behavior” which organisms would survive.

I must ask: how does what Gould write differ from what I wrote in my original post?

In any case, Gould immediately admits:

But if we face the Burgess fauna honestly, we must admit that we have no evidence whatsoever--not a shred--that losers in the great decimation were systematically inferior in adaptive design to those who survived. Anyone can invent a plausible story after the fact. For example, Anomalocaris, though the largest of Cambrian predators, did not come up a winner. So I could argue that its unique nutcracker jaw, incapable of closing entirely, and probably working by constriction rather than tearing apart of prey, really wasn't as adaptive as a more conventional jaw made of two pieces clamping together. Perhaps. But I must honestly face the counterfactual situation. Suppose that Anomalocaris had lived and flourished. Would I not then have been tempted to say, without any additional evidence, that Anomalocaris had survived because its unique jaw worked so well? If so, then I have no reason to identify Anomalocaris as destined for failure. I only know that this creature died--and so, eventually, do we all. (Gould, 1989 p. 236-237).

So even granting everything in the redefinition, the Darwinist is not helped out at all.

Once more we see that Darwinists play shell games with the term “Natural Selection.” It means one thing in one context, but it evolves to mean something else when they need it to mean something else. There is no precision in the term Natural Selection (because a precise term neuters it—a precise definition of Natural Selection is agreeable to the Creationist, after all!).

Now that we have seen this, the rest of Anonymous’s comment falls in short order. But to be complete, let us go through it now:

For example, under certain conditions, it may be advantageous for a given species to become larger.

This is a tacit admission that we are concerned with fitness, not whether an organism is “stronger” or “weaker.” After all, what is advantageous in one environment is not in another. Yet if this is the case, then Natural Selection must remain a tautology: those organisms that survive are those that survive. There is nothing of substance to Natural Selection after this admission by our anonymous commenter.

The fact that natural selection favors one evolution trend under certain conditions, and another (perhaps opposite one) under other conditions, hardly makes it irrelevant.

The use of the term “favors” in the above is smuggling teleology in through the back door. There is no consciousness in Natural Selection. It cannot favor anything. Instead, we only have “certain animals survive in certain environments, and we call this Natural Selection.” Very illuminating…

To go back to the moth example, maybe it’s true that natural selection will lead to the extinction of the slow white ones, given the evolutionary pressure they are facing (see the dodo for a real life example). But let’s not forget that it’s also natural selection that caused them to be slow and white in the first place.

Again, only objects that exist can “cause” anything. Natural Selection is not an object. It does not have any existence. It doesn’t cause anything. Saying Natural Selection “caused them to be slow…” is to once again attempt to smuggle teleology in through the backdoor. Everyone knows that teleology is there, but to admit it is to deny Darwinism. That is why we have to smuggle this stolen concept in.

As for the relative stability of species, I would venture that fitness to a particular environment is always a matter of optimization under (many) constraints, and the capacity to adapt is one of critical components of success. Many species have become too "perfect" for their own good, and ended up extinct.

Except the reason I brought up the stability of species was to demonstrate that even granting Darwinist views of Natural Selection as an actual entity that works in nature, it doesn’t mean Darwinism is true. Darwinism has far greater hurdles to mount, and Darwinists use the trivial portions of their theory as the capital for assuming the rest.

Indeed, allow me to propose an analogy of how Darwinism works. Suppose that Chuck Darwin, Charles’s great-great-great-great-great grandson, read a book by Tommy Malthus entitled “An Essay on the Principal of Physical Motion.” In Tommy’s essay, he provides overwhelming evidence that Newton’s Laws of Motion are correct, specifically noting that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Tommy proposes that this means when you step on the accelerator of your car, the tires of your car are actually pushing the Earth backwards.

Chuck examines his vehicle and sees that it is so. Then he realizes something else and makes a connection no one else has done yet. The Earth is rotating, see. But why is it rotating?

Well, if every force has an equal and opposite reaction, then it is most certainly possible that if you had enough cars accelerating over enough time in the same direction, a stationary Earth would eventually begin to spin.

Chuck pens a book entitled: “On The Origin of Earth’s Rotation by Means of Vehicular Acceleration.” In this book, he proposes that over the last several billion years, there have been cars that always go in the same direction which provide just enough kick to get the Earth moving at the rate it is currently spinning.

Naturally, there are skeptics. Chuck is not dissuaded. “Park a car on gravel and accelerate. You will see the gravel spray out behind the vehicle.” And indeed it is so. Of course, we cannot test the entire Earth for this…but that is a simple extrapolation from the available test. Soon, Chuck’s theory is accepted by every scientist. After all, if all the elements were just right, the theory would actually accomplish what it says. And we have scientific proof in the form of watching cars accelerate right now that is consistent with Chuck’s theory. And to top it all off, the theory is based on Newton’s laws which only the Einsteinian fundamentalists have any problems with!

And so in the space of just a few generations, Chuckians use “evidence” that is trivial to prove a theory that is absurd. So goes the course of science…

Trivially True

A few years ago, I went to The Denver Museum of Nature and Science with my cousin, although truth in advertising ought to render the name The Denver Temple for Naturalistic Humanism. In the evolution corner of this temple, they had a computer running a game that was designed to teach Natural Selection. The game was simple: you start with about a dozen moths. Some of the moths were slow, some were fast. Some were dark and some were bright. These moths fluttered around the screen and the person who played the game got to be the predator “eating” moths.

Most people caught the slow bright moths. After about half the population was “eaten”, the remaining population randomly bred and the characters were passed on based on Mendel’s genetic theories. Then a new generation came forth and you got to eat more moths.

After a time, the slow bright moths went extinct and you’d be left with a bunch of fast dark moths. This would prove Natural Selection.

Except that my cousin and I knew that this was what the game wanted, so we purposely killed the fast dark moths. By the end of the game, we were left with a bunch of slow bright moths. But have no fear. Our version of events proved Natural Selection too.

How’s that? Because we, as predators, selected against the fast dark moths just as much as the average predator selected against slow bright moths.

There is a problem with this kind of “proof” for a theory. A theory that “proves” everything really proves nothing. It becomes an irrelevant factor.

For a simple example of this, consider the equation: x + n = y + n. In this case, we have a “like term” in both sides of the equation. As anyone familiar with algebra knows, we can cancel like terms out because they are irrelevant to the rest of the equation. If the left side has a “+ n” and the right side has a “+ n”, the “+ n” gives us no meaningful information for determining the answer to the problem. If we subtract “+ n” from both sides, we get the simple x = y.

Now suppose that “x + n = y + n” represents a theory that I was going to argue was valid. If my argument consisted of proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that “+ n” was true, does my argument provide any meaningful substance? Obviously not. The “+ n” factor is trivial. It can be true (or false for that matter) and it has no impact on the rest of the theory, because in the end “+ n” cancels itself out.

The reason I bring this up is to make what is a rather obvious, yet easily missed, point. Darwinists are quick to point to Natural Selection as their explanation for what drives Darwinism. However, the way they use Natural Selection renders the term trivial. We return to my original example of the moth program. It is true that selection occurs when the average person kills off the slow bright moths. But it is likewise true that selection occurs when I kill off the fast dark moths. In both sides of this equation, selection occurs. But the fact of selection is irrelevant to which species lives and which dies in that computer program. It does not matter if a choice is made; it matters what the determining factors of that selection are.

This game was supposed to analogize natural functions by using human selection as a pattern of natural selection (no one can fault the programmers as Darwin used the same analogy). But the issue of selection is not relevant, for if it were then it would be impossible for me to go against the outcome. That is, if Natural Selection were not trivial, we would be able to say “The slow bright moths will go extinct” and no matter what they would go extinct. But because I can choose to kill off the fast dark moths, this result is not guaranteed. To then say, “That’s Natural Selection too” is to stretch the term to the point of breaking.

If we use Gould’s concept of “rerunning life’s tape” a second time, we see that Natural Selection is trivial in nature too. If Natural Selection is a viable theory, we must be able to predict beforehand which populations will survive any specific event, and which will not. It is not enough to slap the label “Natural Selection” after the fact. To be a meaningful experiment, we must be able to predict. (This is basic science and should not be controversial.)

But we cannot predict which species will survive and which will not. Even in theory, we cannot determine which fossils would survive and which would not given a “do over” at a cataclysmic event. To say, “No matter what result occurs, that process is called Natural Selection” is to relegate Natural Selection to a completely irrelevant term. This doesn’t necessarily make Natural Selection false, it just makes it trivial.

Put it this way. Darwinists use Natural Selection as an explanatory theory. That is, the reason that one organism lives and another dies is because of Natural Selection. But in the above we have seen that if this were true, we could use Natural Selection to predict which would live and which would not. But that is not even possible in principal. Therefore, Natural Selection cannot be explanatory for it is claimed true regardless of which organism lives and which organism dies. If it is not explanatory, it can only be definitional (that is: “The process by which an organism lives while another organism dies out is known as Natural Selection”). But definitions are tautologies, not explanations.

In the end, Natural Selection cannot be an explanation for why any organism survives. It becomes the “+ n” in the equation, for it is tautologically true regardless of anything else. Natural Selection therefore may be true, but it will remain trivial. Indeed, under this process Natural Selection is true in Creationism and Intelligent Design as well as Darwinism. Since Natural Selection is not explanatory under this system and instead is a definition that those organisms that survive are those that survive, it remains trivial.

Perhaps the greatest evidence of this lies in the fact that while a Darwinist may often claim, “Darwinism is just as proven as Einstein’s theory of Relativity” you will never hear a physicist say, “Einstein’s theory of Relativity is just as proven as Darwinism.” The reason? A physicist can say, “If Einstein is true, light will bend when it passes through a gravity field; and it will not bend if it is false.” There is only one possible outcome, and we can see that light does indeed bend in gravity. On the other hand, the Darwinist says, “If organism X lives, it is Natural Selection; but if it dies it is Natural Selection too.”

There is a world of difference between the two.