evolution: the effects of a theory without natural selection (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, October 30, 2024, 19:10 (22 days ago) @ David Turell

From Neil Thomas:

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/10/the-fate-of-evolution-without-natural-selection/

"The last four decades have produced numerous independent studies which have all found Darwin wanting on purely scientific grounds. This, as intimated above, has clear implications for materialist philosophy since, if the only materialist theory accounting for the nature of things is discredited, this in good logic leaves only supra-natural causation on the table. (my bold)

***

"...Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini mounted an uncompromising critique of Darwin’s notion of natural selection, pointing out its fundamental misconception in devastatingly simple terms:

"Darwin was inadequately impressed by the fact that breeders have minds — they act out of their beliefs, desires and intentions and so on — whereas of course, nothing of that sort is true in the case of natural selection.

"Darwin’s impermissibly anthropomorphic and perhaps unwittingly vitalist comparison of stock-rearing with the purely inanimate tendencies of “natural selection” had already been pointed out to him by Alfred Russel Wallace and by Sir Charles Lyell who both objected that the analogy between resourceful nurture and dumb nature was untenable. Most gravely for Darwin, Lyell also pointed out that there could be no such thing in nature as natural selection (a process which would require cognitive abilities). What Darwin had meant to say, Lyell proposed, was natural preservation (which is wholly unpremeditated and in essence merely a statistic without creative power). (my bold)

"It was a criticism that Darwin rather grudgingly consented to accept but, despite his nominal concession, failed to explain how mere preservation could lead to the kind of new biological pathways which would be necessary to “evolve” different kinds of limbs, physical frames, or superior brains. As Richard Milner has commented, “Natural selection is an eliminative process that does not explain the generation, proliferation and direction of varieties.
(my bold)
***

"I find equivocation about the matter of evolution without natural selection puzzling. The briefest account of the historical sequence of the ideas of, first evolution, then natural selection, will explain my sense of disquiet.

***

"With reference to that brief chronological reprise, my point is: If some leading 21st-century scientists and philosophers are now picking (rather large) holes in the idea of natural selection, what price evolution itself? There is surely no logical necessity to accept the truth-status of evolution without natural selection, is there? Ideally, I would like to hear an answer to that question from a competent authority since I have a nagging feeling that I, a non-specialist, might be missing something here. At any rate it does not seem reasonable to accept the veridical status of evolution on the basis of what an increasing number of scientists are beginning to perceive as a “dodgy dossier” which nevertheless furnished the essential precondition for people’s acceptance of evolution in the first place."

Comment: the second and third bolds above is the position we have established here. Natural selection has no design capacity. It is a result of the struggle to survive. The first bold is my position. Why not design and its designer?