Too many lazy authors take the principle of natural selection out of biology, where it belongs, and then apply it outside its proper sphere in ways that can only be regarded as completely preposterous.
No, this is not another article on evolution, still less an attack on it. Provided that that unfortunately loose term evolution means strictly “descent with modification,” it hardly seems possible to deny it without denying the findings of genetics. Of course controversy still rages about how genuinely explanatory the term natural selection is inside the undisputed reality of evolutionary biology. But as long as natural selection refers to differential rates of survival”whereby some organisms survive to reproductive age and others don’t, with the former getting to transmit their genes and the latter not”I would at least concede heuristic value to the term.
