I think we’d agree that “selection” more or less satisfactorily explains the primary mechanism utilized (supposedly “artificially,” by humans) to “evolve,” for example, wolves into shi-tzus, and that humans have been using that mechanism for more than 150 years on various plants and animals; so I’d argue that humans have been aware of “selection” for far more than 150 years (although they may have used other terms, e.g., “breeding” rather than “selection”)—but of course Darwin was clever enough to put a “natural” in front of “selection,” and voila! we now have “natural selection,” a new and, you insist, “extremely powerful explanatory tool,” to explain an evolution that is nevertheless, supposedly, ultimately purposeless, directionless, blind, and essentially unpredictable. Go figure.

Most things seem to “evolve,” and some sort of “selection” usually, if not always, seems to be implicated in the process.

But invoking “selection” and calling it “natural,” and maybe even embellishing it with the cool sounding “differential reproductive success,” to “predict” how/why “mother wasps that bias the sex ratio of their offspring toward females when laying eggs into large hosts will have more grand-children in the long run than mother wasps that do not do this,” which initially may sound impressive, is nevertheless ultimately circular, and just not terribly enlightening.

Regarding the “circular mechanism” of “divine influence,” greater minds than ours have already considered such things, like Einstein’s spirit vastly superior to that of man manifest in the laws of the universe, or Planck’s conscious and intelligent Mind that is the matrix of all matter, or Penrose’s universe that has a purpose and that’s not here somehow by chance.

So anyhoo, I still think that Dawkins got it right, that “natural selection” is a belief that can’t be proved.