Okay Fred . . . you've AGAIN repeated your opinion on this matter, to my chagrin. I want to be able to discuss this subject with you - I really do. But we just cannot hold such a discussion until you've made some attempt to really dig into the literature on evolution. Believe me, Fred, I take everything I hear with a grain of salt, but natural selection is one of those ideas that just doesn't break down under even the most intense scrutiny. That is not to say we know everything there is to know, or that the field isn't still rife with controversial arguments, but everyone agrees on the validity of Darwin's core ideas - not because we're fawning over previous generations of scientists, but because natural selection is an extremely powerful explanatory tool. Again, you can see this for yourself by reading source material (I glean that you've read Mayr's philosophy of biology, but that isn't the right vein - you need to see some basal theoretical and empirical work on the subject to get a better feel for what it is in practice).

In responding to this, I'm going to more or less repeat an argument made in one of our older discussions. I want you to directly address these two parallel points in your response, to make sure that we're on the same page. Don't simply refer to Dawkins and say that evolution is a belief - I want you to present an argument of your own.

1) Evolutionary Biology, like other forms of history, is inherently circular, for it attempts to explain current patterns based upon past events. Because the end-result is already known, the explanation must, almost by definition, be circular. This is what I think you really mean when you refer to the circularity of evolution. In this sense, Fred, EVERY possible explanation of life MUST be circular. If we agree that evolution happened, what remains to be explained is the mechanism by which it happened; this leads us to the central issue of natural selection.

**We've accepted that evolution, as a form of history, contains an element of circularity . . . we're now moving on to the different potential mechanisms by which evolution may have occurred.**

2) Evolution by natural selection entails the differential survival and reproducion of replicating entities in time, leading to the biased preservation of heritable information that is better able to make copies of itself in a particular environment. One moves from generation A to generation B to generation C, ad infinitum . . . the process of natural selection is therefore non-circular both temporally and logically, and it arises by virtue of heritable information and differential reproduction alone (This leaves open the question of how the first replicating entities arose, but the mechanistic explanations for it are certainly non-circular, while the supernatural explanations are highly circular). Yes, Fred, the core principle of selection can be drawn from common sense (funny that no one thought of it until 150 years ago) . . . but the extensions of this principle are not at all obvious. You will immediately see this if you look into the references I've provided for you. If you want math-oriented work, go for something on population genetics, or read Fisher's classic Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (this one takes months to digest, though).

Now consider an alternative mechanism of evolution: e.g., divine influence. This idea proposes that an intelligence of some kind was already present at the beginning of everything, and eventually produced intelligence of its own ilk in the form of human beings. I cannot imagine a more blatantly circular mechanism of evolution . . . it proposes that the end-result (intelligence) was already present at the beginning, thus incorporating the phenomenon under investigation into the definition of the mechanism by which it arose. You can't get much more circular than that.