(March 13, 2014 at 12:35 pm)professor Wrote: I now understand.That is one of the standard theist responses when natural selection is explained, which is a case of doubling down on the initial misconception regarding the term. Natural selection is not an agent that is aware of what it is doing. It's like saying that the wind is god because it scatters flower petals in pleasing patterns in the air.
I should have promoted natural selection to the status of a god, making it's decisions on what it wants to keep and what it wants to throw out. Very good.
You have gotten rid of that pesky god you didn't like, and gotten a new one instead.
Well done.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
