Alan Fox Doesn't Understand Evolution

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From Alan:

Not true, as far as I understand evolution. The generation of variation is stochastic but the selection process, environmental design, as I like to call it, is not.

1- There isn't any selection process- natural selection is a process of elimination- Mayr "What Evolution Is". Basically whatever is good enough to survive and reproduce seeds the next generation.

2- The environment doesn't design so calling it environmental design is wrong and misleading

Alan was responding to the claim that Darwinian evolution (and the modern synthesis) posits a meaningless collection of accidents. Apparently Alan is unaware that natural selection is just one way genetic accidents accumulate. And seeing that natural selection is being blind, mindless and without purpose those accumulations of accidents would be meaningless.

According to Darwinian evolution all genetic changes are accidents, mistakes and errors.


Ernst Mayr in “What Evolution Is”

To be fit means to possess certain properties that increase the probability of survival. This interpretation is equally applicable to the “nonrandom survival” definition of natural selection. Not all individuals have an equal probability for survival because the individuals that have properties making survival more probable are a restricted nonrandom component of the population. Page 118

It isn't non-random in any significant way. Not in any way that would make it non-stochastic nor anything other than a meaningless collection of accidents.

page 281: On natural selection being a pressure or force

What is meant, of course, is simply that a consistent lack of success of certain phenotypes and their elimination from the population result in the observed changes in a population

On the role of chance:

The first step in selection, the production of genetic variation, is almost exclusively a chance phenomenon except that the nature of the changes at a given locus is strongly constrained. Chance plays an important role even at the second step, the process of elimination of the less fit individuals. Chance may be particularly important in the haphazard survival during periods of mass extinction.

Alan Fox, ignorant of evolution but determined to defend it against other positions that he is even more ignorant of. And the sad part is no one from the evo camp is stepping forward to correct him- sad in a funny way because most likely they don't know any better than Alan!!!111!!!!!11!!