Early on, Gilder repeats the old canard about natural selection being a tautology: “…at its root, Darwinian theory is tautological. What survives is fit; what is fit survives,” he writes. This is really bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, requiring a willful misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Let’s clear this up: Natural selection is about the probability of an organism surviving and reproducing relative to the rest of the population. The theory requires that some features of living things are more conducive to survival and reproduction than are others; hence if these features are heritable, they will increase in frequency over successive generations. Since there is no a priori requirement that this be true of the world, it’s hardly a tautology, now is it?
It appears that both Delusion and Mr. Reuland would benefit appreciable from a refresher course in basic logic.
Reuland states that the concept of natural selection is not a tautology (a logically circular concept that is true by definition) and then proceeds to claim:
Natural selection is about the probability of an organism surviving and reproducing relative to the rest of the population. The theory requires that some features of living things are more conducive to survival and reproduction than are others; hence if these features are heritable, they will increase in frequency over successive generations.
Translation: Natural selection claims that, to the degree an organism actually survives to pass on its genetic material to successive generations...they, well, survive to pass on their DNA to successive generations. All the rest of the verbiage regarding "probability" and some features of living things being "more conducive" to such passing on of genetic material is nothing more than details within the same basic conceptual framework.
That there is no
a priori necessity of natural selection having ever existed at all is irrelevant: the theory of evolution by natural selection
assumes this to be the case and assumes this to be an inherent feature of the natural world. The concept, however, is tautological on cursory inspection as it does nothing more than claim that what happened - happened. Natural selection isn't so much an explanation of the actual mechanisms of evolutionary change as it is a pointing out of their effects - the actual selections or de-selections that took place or can be theorized to be taking place at present.
All organic forms now present, or that were ever present on earth must have, by their very existence, been selected for. All those possible forms that never existed, or existed briefly and were culled out by natural selective forces, were, by definition, not selected. As an explanation for a primary mechanism of evolutionary change, then, natural selection simply explains itself, but provides no real explanatory information that tells us anything we didn't know before, such as that a tree species that does not have genetic or morphological defenses against some insect that uses it as food can be deselected from further evolutionary development by its failure to develop those defenses, and can be taken into extinction by said insect.
A species that cannot adapt adequately to climatic changes over time (climatic minimums and maximums) may become extinct - a victim of selective pressures to which it could not acclimatize itself.
Gilder is precisely correct. No possible empirical observation or test could possible falsify the concept of natural selection, as nothing in the natural world that actually exists can ever count as evidence against it, as nothing in the natural world that actually exists could ever be anything other than that which was, in actuality, selected or which is in the process of being selected or not selected to various degrees. As the natural environment changes over time, as populations become isolated and diverge evolutionarily, change occurs, and all change is subsumed within the concept of selective evolutionary pressure. It can always be verified empirically, but never falsified. Everything that occurs in nature can be understood as evidence of natural selection, so long as their is any variation at all, such as differences in beak size.
We could live in a world where all organisms, regardless of their traits, were equally likely to survive and reproduce. But a century of experiment and observation shows that this isn’t the case. In their famous work on Darwin’s Finches, Peter and Rosemary Grant found that a difference as small as 0.5 mm in beak size was enough to cause a measurable change in the likelihood of survival. Obviously, given that those features which improve survival can be detected empirically, Gilder’s blather about everything being equally good is nonsense.
Which is to say that a Finch with flippers would ultimately be selected out as a viable life form, unless some niche in which this adaptation was useful and maximized survivability opened up or was already present. Natural selection still remains self defining here. What is selected is selected, and what is not is not.
That the selective process has been empirically detected on the level of surface phenomena simply confirms the tautology; we have no further information on how evolutionary processes actually work, only that they are working, which is trivial.
No point in going on, as the rest of the article, like its proceeding bulk, is primarily a snarky ad hominem attack on Gilder, and not a serious critique of his ideas. Reuland is just a Darwinian fundamentalist who has a chip on his shoulder against God, and hence, a chip on his shoulder against "intelligent design."
Reuland needs to believe, not for scientific reasons, but for personal, worldview reasons, that all is blind, random chance, and blind, random chance is all.