Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Janet Kellogg Ray on Common Misconceptions of Natural Selection/"Survival of the Fittest"

  

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)