Natural Selection is Not Chance

Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise natural selection could quite unaided have drawn all the music of the biosphere. Indeed natural selection operates upon the products of chance and knows no other nourishment; but it operates in a domain of very demanding conditions, from which chance is banned.

 Natural Selection Works with Existing Material

It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species. Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine.

 Taking the Magic out of Natural Selection.

'Planning' is simply the result of experience read backward and projected into the future. To me the 'purposive' action of a beehive is simply the summation and integration of its units, and Natural Selection has put higher and higher premiums on the most 'purposeful' integration. It is the same way (to me) in the evolution of the middle ear, the steps in the Cynodonts (clearly shown by me in 1910 and by you later in Oudenodon) make it easier to see how such a wonderful device as the middle e...

 Experiment is the Ultimate Test

The ultimate test of a scientific hypothesis is experiment. Experiment specifically means that you don't just wait for nature to do something, and passively observe it and see what it correlates with. You go in there and do something. You manipulate. You change something, in a systematic way, and compare the result with a 'control' that lacks the change, or you compare it with a different change. [...] If your hypothesis is that the non-random survival of random genetic variation has import...

 Everyone is a Choosing Agent

1 Humans deliberately choose attractive roses, sunflowers etc. for breeding, thereby preserving the genes that produce the attractive features. This is called artificial selection, it's something humans have known about since long before Darwin, and everybody understands that it is powerful enough to turn wolves into chihuahuas and to stretch maize cobs from inches to feet. 2 Peahens (we don't know whether consciously and deliberately, but let's guess not) choose attractive peacocks for bree...