2008 Woodie Awards
Natural Selection: Science or More Than Science?
Shalom Carmy
Issue date: 8/31/05 Section: Features
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When people used to suggest that natural selection is only a theory, not a fact, they may have meant that evolutionists invent plausible stories about how the history of species may have unfolded long ago, but do not test the truth of these stories in a laboratory, as real scientists (read physicists) do. This imputation is obviously false. Viruses rapidly evolve resistance to drugs, demonstrating that, over several generations, biological organisms with an advantage over other organisms (in this case, the ability to coexist with the drug regimen) will win out over those other organisms. Presumably the same principle would have operated in the past as well: natural selection of the fittest must be responsible for much biological development. This is so obvious that philosophers of biology have labored to show that survival of the fittest is not a mere tautology and that evolutionists are actually telling us something we did not know beforehand. What makes a scientist a card-carrying evolutionist is the belief that the mechanism of natural selection is the primary cause of change.
When Darwin wrote in the late 19th century, and for several generations after, the great puzzle was how natural selection operates through heredity. Evolutionists were gradualists. If our society revolved around basketball, taller offspring will be favored, all things being equal, in competing for money, spouses and so forth, and so they will have more children, who in turn will be rewarded for their height. When dogs came indoors, the tamer ones were favored; so modern dogs progressively diverge from their vulpine origins.
This model of selection, through the intensification of an advantageous trait, fails to fit many important cases. Biologists say that reptiles evolved into birds: Does that mean that reptiles with rudimentary wings were better equipped for survival? No, because wings alone are useless appendages, burdens rather than boons. Flying requires other complex adjustments, the coincidence of which must be more than sheer luck A naturalistic explanation of the transition from reptile to bird assumes that wings first appeared without any connection to flight, perhaps to help regulate body temperature. Only when other fortuitous changes accumulate does flight become possible.
When Darwin wrote in the late 19th century, and for several generations after, the great puzzle was how natural selection operates through heredity. Evolutionists were gradualists. If our society revolved around basketball, taller offspring will be favored, all things being equal, in competing for money, spouses and so forth, and so they will have more children, who in turn will be rewarded for their height. When dogs came indoors, the tamer ones were favored; so modern dogs progressively diverge from their vulpine origins.
This model of selection, through the intensification of an advantageous trait, fails to fit many important cases. Biologists say that reptiles evolved into birds: Does that mean that reptiles with rudimentary wings were better equipped for survival? No, because wings alone are useless appendages, burdens rather than boons. Flying requires other complex adjustments, the coincidence of which must be more than sheer luck A naturalistic explanation of the transition from reptile to bird assumes that wings first appeared without any connection to flight, perhaps to help regulate body temperature. Only when other fortuitous changes accumulate does flight become possible.