stevestory
Posts: 13407
Joined: Oct. 2005
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I see BillB beat me to it.
Index of Creationist Claims:
| Quote | Claim CA500:
Natural selection, or "survival of the fittest," is tautologous (i.e., uses circular reasoning) because it says that the fittest individuals leave the most offspring, but it defines the fittest individuals as those that leave the most offspring.
Source:
Gish, Duane T., R. B. Bliss and W. R. Bird. 1981. Summary of scientific evidence for creation. Impact 95-96 (May/Jun.). http://www.icr.org/index.p....&ID=177
Morris, Henry M. 1985. Scientific Creationism. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, p. viii.
Response:
"Survival of the fittest" is a poor way to think about evolution. Darwin himself did not use the phrase in the first edition of Origin of Species. What Darwin said is that heritable variations lead to differential reproductive success. This is not circular or tautologous. It is a prediction that can be, and has been, experimentally verified (Weiner 1994).
The phrase cannot be a tautology if it is not trivially true. Yet there have been theories proposing that the fittest individuals perish:
Alpheus Hyatt proposed that lineages, like individuals, inevitably go through stages of youth, maturity, old age, and death. Towards the end of this cycle, the fittest individuals are more likely to perish than others (Hyatt 1866; Lefalophodon n.d.).
The theory of orthogenesis says that certain trends, once started, kept progressing even though they become detrimental and lead to extinction. For example, it was held that Irish elks, which had enormous antlers, died out because the size increase became too much to support.
The "fittest" individuals could be considered those that are ideally suited to a particular environment. Such ideal adaptation, however, comes at the cost of being more poorly adapted to other environments. If the environment changes, the fittest individuals from it will no longer be well adapted to any environment, and the less fit but more widely adapted organisms will survive.
The fittest, to Darwin, were not those which survived, but those which could be expected to survive on the basis of their traits. For example, wild dogs selectively prey on impalas which are weaker according to bone marrow index (Pole et al. 2003). With that definition, survival of the fittest is not a tautology. Similarly, survival can be defined not in terms of the individual's life span, but in terms of leaving a relatively large contribution to the next generation. Defined thus, survival of the fittest becomes more or less what Darwin said, and is not a tautology. |
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc....00.html
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