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Charles Darwin imagined that something he called "natural selection" could, together with time and numerous successive generations, produce the diversity of life from some simple biological replicators. Numerous slight, successive modifications would accumulate while others were culled- eliminated by nature.
From "What Evolution Is" page 117:
What Darwin called natural selection is actually a process of elimination.
However, there isn't any steadfast rule on what gets eliminated. Most of that depends on the environment. That is, it is contingent on environmental pressures. What survives could be the tallest or shortest; the slimmest or fattest; the slowest or fastest; the best sight or no eyes at all; long legs or no legs; with each of those extremes having numerous intermediate stages.
Ibid page 118:
Do selection and elimination differ in their evolutionary consequences? This question never seems to have been raised in the evolutionary literature. A process of selection would have a concrete objective, the determination of the “best” or “fittest” phenotype. Only a relatively few individuals in a given generation would qualify and survive the selection procedure. That small sample would be only to be able to preserve only a small amount of the whole variance of the parent population. Such survival selection would be highly restrained.
By contrast, mere elimination of the less fit might permit the survival of a rather large number of individuals because they have no obvious deficiencies in fitness. Such a large sample would provide, for instance, the needed material for the exercise of sexual selection. This also explains why survival is so uneven from season to season. The percentage of the less fit would depend on the severity of each year’s environmental conditions.
Serendipity comes into play with the fact that the genetic variation is left to 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.- Ernst Mayr "What Evolution Is"
Anyone who understands natural selection knows it is nothing more than contingent serendipity.
For example, from
The Origin of Theoretical Population Genetics (University of Chicago Press, 1971), reissued in 2001 by
William Provine:
Natural selection does not act on anything, nor does it select (for or against), force, maximize, create, modify, shape, operate, drive, favor, maintain, push, or adjust. Natural selection does nothing….Having natural selection select is nifty because it excuses the necessity of talking about the actual causation of natural selection. Such talk was excusable for Charles Darwin, but inexcusable for evolutionists now. Creationists have discovered our empty “natural selection” language, and the “actions” of natural selection make huge, vulnerable targets. (pp. 199-200)
Thanks for the honesty Will. Natural selection is incapable of producing biological complexity. Evos have been promoting bullshit for over 160 years.
