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Topic: Neil Broom: What is Natural Selection? A Plea for Clarification
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posted 25. February 2002 23:28
What is Natural Selection? A Plea for Clarification
by Neil Broom
nd.broom@auckland.ac.nz
ABSTRACT—I argue in this paper that any evolutionary theory of life that excludes from the living world a primary non-material or transcendent dimension or guiding presence, is no theory at all. The materialist's claim that natural selection supplies this evolutionary 'arrow' but is entirely material in its action, is a fundamentally dishonest claim. If there is no real purposive agenda that natural selection is pursuing then the expression "natural selection" is blatantly misleading and should be deleted from the evolutionary vocabulary.
To read the entire paper, please click here
[ 23 July 2002, 20:41: Message edited by: Moderator ]
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Douglas D. Rudy
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posted 29. April 2002 07:17
First let me say thanks for your book _How Blind is the Blind Watchmaker_. I very much enjoyed it!
In response to your posting, I think a Darwinist would reply that the language of intentionality, that organisms want to survive and reproduce etc., isn't really an indicator of a fundamental flaw in the materialistic project of explaining life purely in terms of chance and natural regularity, but is another way of saying "differential survival". So in Dawkins' explanation of the evolution of the eye, a 5% eye that enables its owner to capture prey and thus leave a next generation of offspring under conditions in which its competitors with a 4% eye fail to leave offspring is a characteristic which will propagate throughout the population. Only in this sense is it "better".
You capture the fatal flaw in this argument, I think, when you point out the distinction between a non-functional, though n% completed, eye, and an n% functional eye. From an engineering perspective, it is obvious from every complex system we can reverse engineer that any modification to such systems quickly reaches an impasse in which small changes (the kind within reach of random mutations) break the system completely, and only by a concerted array of changes can the non-functional intermediate states be crossed to reach the new functional state. Dawkins' central claim (that you can get anywhere in morphological space via arbitrarily small changes) is almost certainly false for any complex system, including biological systems.
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