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Guliuzza, Randy J. (2014) Does Natural Selection Exist?—Comment 1, Part II: Creatures' Adaptation Explained by the Design-Based, Organism-Driven Approach. Answers Research Journal, 7: 24. pp. 421-437. ISSN 1937-9056
This second installment is a continuation of my response to a recent critical paper (Jeanson 2013) on a series of Acts & Facts articles published by the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). The series contrasted a programmed design innate to organisms that enables them to fill environmental niches versus natural selection. For brevity, I refer to the critical paper as "the critique" and the Acts & Facts articles as the "series." Part 2 corrects the critique's inaccurate assertion that throughout the series I fail to address the "process use" of natural selection in rejecting it as simply a misleading mystical mental construct. I document why the critique should not claim with any certainty, from an array of other conflicting definitions, that "a process" underlies an accurate definition of natural selection. Four objective findings are noted as to why natural selection is not like a design process or other real processes, since within "the natural selection process," several steps or elements are outside the realm of human detection or understanding, i.e., mystical. While the unambiguously identifiable elements claimed for natural selection, are all linked to an organism's innate systems or their outcomes. Significantly, the key "selection step" (in the critique's process definition of natural selection) cannot be observed in nature or attributed to mindless nature, but "selection" is only an imagined event in a selectionist's mind—who then projects selective capacity onto nature. Scientific documentation is lacking to quantify an environmental "selection pressure," or to identify corresponding selective elements legitimizing natural selection's equivalence to the real "artificial" selection process by conscious human agency—even though these are basic essentials of naturalistic paradigms. Details of the inherent mysticism of selectionism are identified within the critique due to it embracing Darwin's mystical twist of the word "selection" that distorts its normal usage or invalidly ascribes selective/volitional attributes to inanimate environments. The critique's misleading usage of "selection" coupled with its untestable supposition that non-sentient environments can exercise agency are core tenets of selectionists, and generally fit with selectionism's veneration of nature (principally through the reification or deification of natural selection). These problems with natural selection were addressed in the series' eight major arguments which, this response shows, the critique only minimally engaged.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | Q Science (General) > QH Natural History. Biology > QH359 Biological Evolution > QH359.3 Natural Selection Q Science (General) > QH Natural History. Biology > QH103 Variation, Adaptation, and Speciation |
| Depositing User: | Admin |
| Date Deposited: | 04 Sep 2026 23:46 |
| Last Modified: | 04 Sep 2026 23:46 |
| URI: | https://crsq.creationresearch.org/id/eprint/1827 |