You’re in completely over your head here, baby. You don’t have a freaking clue what is even going on. You’re just here for what you believe is a circle-jerk pile on, with me as the target.
But if you’d like to attempt to disprove my assessment, feel free to restate, or even directly quote, those instances where anyone has demonstrated that "natural selection" (absent the influence of external forces, such as described above) amounts to anything more than "those who reproduce best are selected." I’m quite confident you cannot do it. The best you can hope for is to play cheerleader for someone else who might try. So grab your pompoms, beastlie baby, and cheer on your boys.
I am convinced that no single group of humans can be more wilfully blind and dogmatic than is the overwhelmingly majority of LDS apostates. Fortunately, catastrophic events, such as the one presumed to have deselected the dinosaurs, can forcibly bring reproduction to an end. That’s what will happen to apostates at the second coming. And, believe me, deselection will never have come more deserved.
Look, “baby”, I may not have a degree in biology the way some folks here do, but I have long had an interest in evolution and have read quite a few books on the subject. In fact, I’m more than willing to list all the books I’ve read on the subject if you’ll do the same.
But here's one simple post that I think you have not fully grasped, since you keep repeating your same arguments:
EA, quoting from another source:
Survivial of the fittest refers to the idea that organismal forms that are more likey to survive and reproduce viable offspring in a given environment will be more likely to propagate through time. What makes something "fit" isn't the simply that it survives, but that it has traits that are conducive to survival.
And from the same post:
Consider the formula: May the best man win. It seems harmless, but the creationist now points out that we determine which team is best by seeing which wins. If that is what it means to be "best," then the expressed wish seems to reduce to "May the team that wins be the team that wins." It is thus vacuous dogma, objects the creationist, to subsequently explain who won in terms of one team's being "better" than the other. However, we sports fans are not fooled into abandoning the game by such arguments. Of course we do determine which is the best team by looking at its record of wins, and we would certainly explain why it won the trophy by noting its superior record over its rivals. But we understand that this is not the end of the story...even though we do judge on the basis of record, we do not doubt that it is the physical traits of a team, its superior characteristics and playing ability, that make it better than the others. Understanding this, we also understand that it is possible that the best team might not win...This parallels the distinction that biologists make between evolution by natural selection and evolution by natural drift, and the mere fact that we recognize such distinctions is by itself sufficient to show that the tautology objection does not hold in either sports or evolutionary theory. (Pennock 1999:101)
Pennock is pointing out what Mills and Beatty (1979:11) explicitly state: that the fitness of an organism is best described in terms of the organism's propensity to leave offspring, not in terms of its actual reproductive success, which can be affected by pure happenstance. To put it simply, a moose with all of the "right" genes can still get clocked on the head by a meteorite before it gets lucky, while its sickly neighbor goes on to sow its seed far and wide. Since propensities do not automatically translate into actual reproductive success, the idea of fitness, and the natural selection of the fittest, cannot be tautologous.
(ii) To its credit, the young-earth creationist organization Answers in Genesis advises against using this argument.
References
Look at the sentences I bolded. There may be circumstances in which an organism that does not possess traits that enhance survival and reproduction in a certain habitat still manages to survive and reproduce, while the organism that does possess such traits may not survive to reproduce. Hence, the fittest did not “win” in this scenario.
So why do the preferential traits still manage to be overwhelmingly replicated in the population? It’s because we’re not talking about individual organisms, but rather the larger pool of population, and the likelihood and probability of traits enhancing survival and reproduction being seen in increasing rates in future generations, rather than whether or not those same traits will ensure survival and reproduction for one single organism.
The fittest – in terms of specific individuals - do not always survive. Traits that enhance survival and reproduction within a population will become more prevalent in that given population over time.
Let me know when you’re ready to compare texts we’ve read on the subject. In fact, I may already have compiled a list from a conversation in the past, very much like this one.
by the way, how did your argument morph from this:
No, let's see you describe "natural selection" such that it becomes something more than "those who reproduce best are selected."
Into this:
Now your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to demonstate how “natural selection” is able to produce such results absent the influence of external factors—through random mutations or whatnot.