Reply #4: The real problem is with natural selection, not evolution [View All]

Darwin was looking for a completely blind, automatic process to explain evolution -- and he came up with the idea that natural forces inexorably lead to the survival of the "fittest" and the extinction of the less fit.

That notion of the survival of the fittest has always been the weakest part of Darwinian evolution. The very concept is derived from the way humans breed livestock -- which would hardly seem to be a likely model for a theory intended to do away with the need for a divine intelligence. It's also got something unpleasantly mechanistic and even demeaning about it -- which is why many people who are not fundamentalists instinctively feel a distaste for it.

Beyond that, it's never been possible to define "fitness" in any scientific way. And to the extent that natural selection applies at all, it seems to be limited to minor refinements in existing species. It has no ability to explain the appearance of new species -- which may be more a matter of organisms either accidentally or deliberately taking up a way of life to which they're really not well suited and then having to get good at it.

This is not to say that a scientific theory of evolution isn't possible. It will simply have to incorporate a lot of the newer material that is out there around the edges -- ideas about living things as self-organizing systems that to some degree guide their own evolution, about the role of symbiosis and the way in which ecosystems co-evolve, about altruism and other "moral" values as part of what goes into evolutionary "fitness."

When all that happens, I believe that most of the people who currently say they don't believe in Darwinian evolution merely because they don't like the implications of survival of the fittest will be won over. But meanwhile, no amount of arguing as to why evolution is "true" will succeed in making it any more popular.