Natural selection does not mean perfection. The term “survival of
the fittest” is a misleading and inaccurate definition of natural selection.
“Survival of the fittest” implies that an individual is the strongest or
fastest or most talented. An individual does not have to be the best in order
to be “fit.” Natural selection is not survival of the fittest. Natural
selection is survival of the “fit enough”: fit enough to survive, find a mate,
and leave offspring.
Evolution is often derided as a “random” or “chance” process.
Skeptics shake their heads and ask how blind-chance events could provide the
beauty and complexity we see in nature. On the contrary, evolution by natural
selection is anything but random. Gene mutations are random, but whether or not
a mutation takes off in a population is definitely not random. Species evolve
because their traits make them fit for the environment. Traits that make a
species less fit lead to its extinction. Natural selection is not a by-chance,
roll-of-the-dice proposition.
It is amazing how much Darwin understood about natural selection,
given he was born in 1809. Charles Darwin lived, worked, wrote, and died before
anyone had ever heard of genes or chromosomes or DNA, much less modern
molecular genetics. And because Gregor Mendel’s work on the heritability of
traits was not recognized until the twentieth century, Darwin never heard of
him, even though they were contemporaries.
Yet, it is common for evolution critics to proof-text the failure
of evolution using the writings of Charles Darwin. Countless apologists throw
modern questions Darwin’s way, and in each case, Darwin fails to answer or even
address the questions.
Darwin died in 1882, seventy-one years before the structure of DNA
was determined. There are countless questions left unanswered by Darwin. He
simply did not have the tools to know. Darwin did not have the tools to answer
to answer, but twenty-first-century science does a really good job of it. No
one suggests we throw out gravitation theory because seventeenth-century Isaac
Newton never addressed the questions of twenty-first-century physicists.
Despite a nineteenth-century framework, the bedrocks of Darwin’s
theory—evolution by natural selection over millions of years and the common
ancestry of all living things—remain unchallenged. (Janet Kellogg Ray, Baby
Dinosaurs on the Ark? The Bible and modern Science and the Trouble of Making it
All Fit [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2021], 35-37)
