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“Natural selection is a tautology.”
Natural selection is in one sense a tautology. Who are the fittest? Those who
survive and leave the most offspring. Who survive and leave the most offspring?
The fittest. But a lot of this is semantic wordplay, and depends on how the
matter is defined, and for what purpose the definition is raised. There are many
areas of life in which circularity and truth go hand in hand. For example, what
is electric charge? That quality of matter on which an electric field acts. What
is an electric field? A region in space that exerts a force on electric charge.
But no one would claim that the theory of electricity is thereby invalid and
can’t explain how motors work; it is only that circularity cannot be used as
independent proof of something. To harp on the issue of tautology can become
misleading, if the impression is given that something tautological therefore
doesn’t happen. Of course the environment can “select,” just as human breeders
select. But demonstrating this doesn’t mean that fish could turn into
philosophers by this means. The real issue is the nature of the variation, the
information problem. Arguments about
tautology distract attention from one of the real weaknesses of
neo-Darwinism—the source of the new information required. Given an appropriate
source of variation (for example, an abundance of created genetic information
with the capacity for Mendelian recombination), replicating populations of
organisms would be expected to be capable of some adaptation to a given
environment, and this has been demonstrated amply in practice.
Natural selection is also a useful explanatory tool in creationist modeling
of post-Flood radiation with speciation.
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