Todd says: Neo-Darwinians seem to buy into that erroneous view, but the reality is that all that natural selection (NS) posits is survival of the fittest, or fitness, which is essentially nothing more than a circular truism or tautology of sorts----i.e. fitness is defined by survival.

The problem with truisms is that although they’re true, at least by definition, they’re not science and don’t actually make specific predictions.

Think of it this way: A bona fide theory or natural law will make specific predictions, and if the predictions turn out to be wrong, then that indicates the theory is too. Typically a theory or natural law can be quantified and expressed as an equation where the terms on both sides of the equation are usually defined elsewhere and the equal sign means “is equal to.” The Darwinian notion of NS, OTOH, can’t be expressed as an equation where one side “is equal to” the other, but rather, at best, can only be articulated as a tautology stating that fitness “is defined by” survival.

Even bona fide scientific theories that are not typically expressed as an equation, like say the Big Bang, can be used to make specific predictions that are more than mere tautological truisms. E.g. the Big Bang model predicted CMBR, subsequently discovered in the 1960s---- if it had been discovered that there were no CMBR, then that would have cast doubt on or invalidated the Big Bang model.

NS, OTOH, didn’t predict, nor could have specifically predicted, what Sean Carrol, in his Endless forms most beautiful, 2005, observes is: “The surprising message from Evo Devo”----“that all of the genes for building large, complex animal bodies long predated the appearance of those bodies in the Cambrian Explosion. The genetic potential was in place for at least 50 million years, and probably a fair bit longer, before large, complex forms emerged.”

And yet, after Evo Devo discovered what Darwinism/NS didn’t nor could have specifically predicted, Darwinians can still invoke natural selection to claim that all that genetic potential, that Evo Devo recently discovered, was obvious selected by NS and survived b/c otherwise it wouldn’t have been, well, selected and survived.

But then I suppose that’s the beauty of the Darwinian NS truism----although it didn’t and couldn’t have predicted the specific discovery made by Evo Devo, it also wasn’t, nor will be, shown to be wrong since it is, after all, a truism. (And even a Darwinian/NS skeptic such as I don’t doubt that selection pressures do indeed seem to play a part in evolution.)