Regarding the “uprooting of the tree of life which Darwin used as an organizing principle,” notice how that uprooting does not diminish the natural selection/survival or the fittest notion? Why? B/c the NS notion is a tautology where fitness is defined by survival----it’s “true” by definition.

Whether there’s a tree of life, a web of life, horizontal gene transfer, space aliens seeding our planet, whatever, the NS tautology dictates that the fittest traits survive b/c if they weren’t the fittest they’d obviously not have survived. It’s an overwhelmingly powerful tautology, and I expect neo-Darwinians will never cease to believe in it.

I suggested in another post that the only thing that might disconfirm the NS tautology in the eyes of the typical neo-Darwinian (other than a decree from Dawkins, unlikely since he too is such a devout NS believer) would be a proclamation from space aliens disconfirming NS; but even that would not convince the typical Darwinian b/c they’d insist that the aliens themselves had to be products of NS----that’s the power of a tautology in those that completely buy into it with a religious-like zeal.