keiths, Choking on Natural Selection

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keiths tries to take Barry Arrington to task over natural selection, but he chokes

1. Even the dimmest of IDers and creationists accepts that “microevolution” occurs.  Insects become pesticide-resistant. Finch beaks change in response to drought conditions.  Microbes acquire antibiotic resistance.  How does this happen?  Through natural selection.  It ain’t a tautology.

No one knows if natural selection didit, keiths. Natural selection requires the mutations to be haphazard, ie accidents, mistakes and errors. And we have no idea if that is what produced the beak variation, pesticide resistance or antibiotic resistance.

2. The tautology mongers miss a basic point about fitness.  Fitness is not defined in terms of the reproductive success of an individual. An unfit individual who gets lucky and reproduces successfully does not get reclassified as fit.  A fit individual who gets hit by a meteorite isn’t reclassified as unfit. To claim that “the fittest” are “those who survive”, as the tautology mongers claim, is ridiculous.

LoL! In biology fitness is all about survival and reproduction. How can one tell if an individual is unfit? keiths never says. How can one tell if an individual is more fit if not by reproductive success? keiths never says.

fitness wrt biology:

Biologists use the word fitness to describe how good a particular genotype is at leaving offspring in the next generation relative to how good other genotypes are at it. So if brown beetles consistently leave more offspring than green beetles because of their color, you’d say that the brown beetles had a higher fitness.