Natural Selection Expanded Upon

Natural selection is, to borrow an analogy, the hinge upon which modern biology turns. Put succinctly, natural selection is the process whereby actions by environmental factors to "favor" some organismal variations and "discourage" others results in the production of variation in living things and hence the rise of species by the accumulation of favorable muations over time. All of this occurs "without direction or purpose," for there is--in the view of the materialistic naturalist--no personality planning or guiding natural selection. There is no end in view. All takes place through the vehicle of randomly-occurring mutations.

The question is not whether natural selection occurs, for it really does, and it has an effect in maintaining the genetic fitness of a given population. Species avoid genetic deterioration due to natural attrition among the genetically unfit. But Darwinists claim further that natural selection has a powerful building effect that can account for all the diversity and complexity observed across the full extent of living organisms on Earth.

Notice the key role played by "time." Time is what Charles Lyell's geology theories gave to Darwin.

Now, Darwin could point to no examples of natural selection in action because none had been observed at that time. However, he drew an analogy with the practice of artificial selection engaged in by animal breeders. While this certainly illustrates the concept of variation and diversity produced over time, the analogy is misleading because breeders employ intelligence and specialized knowledge to produce and protect their charges from natural dangers, while for Darwin the key idea was that purposeless and unintelligent natural processes can substitute for intelligent design. Furthermore, highly bred individuals removed from protection will, through reproduction, revert to the wild type. Natural selection is actually a conservative force that prevents the appearance of extremes of variability. Even the breeding of domestic animals has produced no new species in the formal sense of that word; there is often a semantic failure to distinguish between strains or breeds and species. But even if a rigorous breeding process could succeed in producing a distinct new species, this is far from a demonstration that bacteria could eventuate in a fruit fly.

In fact, natural selection is a tautology. The theory predicts that the fittest organisms will produce the most offspring, yet the biological definition of "fitness" is the ability to produce more offspring. Just about any characteristic can be advantageous or disadvantageous depending upon the environmental circumstances. So natural selection becomes an all-purpose "explanation" that can account for anything and therefore explains nothing. It is non-falsifiable.

But perhaps the greatest utility to which natural selection has been put is that,as conceived by Darwin, it posits a materialistic explanation for organic variation and complexity. It excludes the unacceptable (to some) alternative of supernatural involvement. In short, as we will see when we take up the subject of the receipt of Darwin's ideas, natural selection made it possible to be "an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Or so thought Thomas Huxley.