Not by natural selection? (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, April 30, 2014, 12:57 (3860 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

DAVID: Sometimes organisms don't compete but get along together:-http://www.livescience.com/45205-data-dont-back-up-darwin-in-algae-study-nsf-bts.html-QUOTE: Darwin "was obsessed with competition," Cardinale says. "He assumed the whole world was composed of species competing with each other, but we found that one-third of the species of algae we studied actually like each other. They don't grow as well unless you put them with another species. It may be that nature has a heck of a lot more mutualisms than we ever expected.
"Maybe species are co-evolving," he adds. "Maybe they are evolving together so they are more productive as a team than they are individually. We found that more than one-third of the time, that they like to be together. Maybe Darwin's presumption that the world may be dominated by competition is wrong."-And maybe some folk need to catch up. Lynn Margulis was emphasizing the importance of cooperation in evolution thirty years ago.-TONY: Evolution fails in its predictions [...] Alright boys and girls....according to good scientific practice, what do we do when a theory or hypothesis fails in its predictions?-Hey, hold on. It's not "evolution" that failed, but the hypothesis that evolution only works through competition. The three researchers clearly had their personal beliefs, but even those are restricted here to one aspect of evolution, and now to their surprise they've discovered that evolution works through competition AND cooperation.
 
What do we do when we find something that doesn't fit? We revise our views, but we don't dismiss the WHOLE theory, just because part of it doesn't fit. Even the Pope believes that evolution happened, and even Darwin allowed for the possibility that God created its mechanisms in the first place. The question then is how the mechanisms work, and when it comes to the thorny problem of innovation, we still don't have the answer. So we keep searching. If you believe that apart from at the very beginning, life only comes from life, evolution is still the most likely explanation for all the forms we have now ... whether initiated and/or guided by your God or not.