Short Essay

Natural Selection: The Explanation that Explains Very Little

Throughout the teachings of the biological sciences, and within the many fields of research connected to evolutionary biology, it is implicit that natural selection is the ‘driver’ of adaptation in living things. Described by Darwin as a ‘Power’, selection is said to provide the generative force or ‘pressure’ responsible for creating biodiversity. Yet from the very beginning, the creative power attributed to natural selection has been greatly exaggerated, and is to a large extent illusory – whatever survives was already there! If I remove 2 bad apples out of a bag of 6, the remaining 4 good apples are preserved, but no apples are modified. Preservation is neither creation nor evolution.

Natural selection can certainly modify the proportions of traits in a population, and allow the group to adapt to changing conditions. But it achieves this only thru the crude tool of elimination. No trait itself is generated, originated, made, molded or modified by the action of selection. Nor can selection steer the direction of adaptive change in a reproductive group, unless adaptive traits in that direction have already emerged in some individuals. All adaptations must pre-exist before they can be preserved, and selection does not create the fit any more than it creates the unfit.

As a scientific theory, evolution by means of natural selection falls short of the task, providing little in the way of testability, predictability or falsifiability. Indeed, it is remarkable that this explanation of origins even ranks as a proper scientific theory – as several nonconformists have argued. Beneath it all, the prevailing theory of evolution by means of natural selection is really a theory of evolution by means of random mutation.

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