Sales Gnosis

The actual “selection” process of survival of the fittest — natural selection — is so severe, that only from one in ten to one in a hundred of those born survive to produce young. This of variances affords ample scope for the selection of any variance necessary in order to alter the species in such a was as to bring the species into harmony with changes in conditions. This process of natural selection will be much more easy and certain if we look at how slowly land-surfaces and climates experience permanent changes. Such are the kind of transfers that create and reinforce alterations, first, it is most likely, in the distribution, and subsequently in the structure and habits of species.

We can extrapolate, then, thisutterly unavoidable conclusion from the facts: if natural selection can and does maintain every last continuously varying species in adaptation to a stable environment, that it preserves the immutability of its typical condition. Almost every objector agrees with this viewpoint. In a slowly changing environment, the same phenomenon should unavoidably produce some related change is needed for the well-being and enduring survival of the various species who are subjected to those changed conditions.

I won’t include a further consideration of the dissents professed by critics of the theory. They have, I believe, been amply answered by Darwin and other evolutionary biologists. Some of the most recent have been hashed out in review articles such as the series I am presently posting. The word extinction is a more powerful word than natural selection, but what we really are talking about is the maladapted species who perish while those more adapted survive.

The evolution creationism controversy debate has heightened in the last 20 years, and especially in the last 10. It is posing an unlucky diversion from our undertaking of the further refinement of knowledge, theory and understanding within the study of evolutionary biology. We in the scientific discipline are no doubt frustrated by this, and perhaps we find as a release valve for this frustration a good dose of wit on the sometimes ridiculous debate regarding evolution, creationism and intelligent design.