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WillowOne's Positions

Evolution by natural selection

My Positions

  1. Evolution by natural selection is an observable phenomenon. It has been observed directly in the laboratory, in the field, and in the fossil record.
  2. Evolution by natural selection is, by definition, not a random process. Selection is the opposite of randomness.
  3. Natural selection is the only known mechanism that produces adaptive complexity. Other mechanisms of evolution (genetic drift, mutation, gene flow) change gene frequencies but do not, by themselves, produce fit between organisms and their environments.

Notes

  • Evolution is not a random process. While genetic mutations arise randomly with respect to the organism's needs, natural selection, the central mechanism of biological evolution, is non-random: it systematically favours traits that enhance an organism's chances of survival and reproduction in its environment. The common creationist claim that evolution is "like a tornado in a junkyard assembling a Boeing 747" (Fred Hoyle's image, borrowed by Ken Ham and others) describes a single random step, not a cumulative selective process. The correct analogy is a tornado that keeps every piece that happens to fit, and discards the rest, over millions of iterations. See Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (1996).
  • The mechanism requires only three things: variation between individuals, heredity of that variation, and differential reproductive success depending on it. Wherever these three conditions hold, evolution by natural selection follows as a logical consequence. It is not a hypothesis about what might happen; it is a description of what must happen.
  • Direct observations include:
  • Antibiotic resistance in bacteria and pesticide resistance in insects, observed within years.
  • Richard Lenski's long-term E. coli experiment, running since 1988, now past 75,000 generations, in which one population evolved the ability to metabolise citrate.
  • The Grants' decades-long study of Darwin's finches on Daphne Major, documenting changes in beak size in response to drought.
  • Industrial melanism in the peppered moth.
  • The evolution of new species (speciation) observed in plants (polyploid hybrids), fruit flies, and cichlid fish.
  • Natural selection does not aim at anything. It has no foresight, no goal, and no concept of "higher" or "lower". Humans are not the point of evolution; we are one of its current products, as is every bacterium. The notion of a "ladder" of evolution with humans at the top is a pre-Darwinian idea that has survived in popular culture.

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