An Answer

I think to a large extent it's ridiculous to still be battling over Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection.  What science still holds such a rigid requirement of ideological faithfulness to a scientist who died 136 years before and a theory as vague and problematic as his version of natural selection? 

If his theory hadn't become a tool for atheists on the one hand and Biblical fundamentalists on the other, I think it would never have maintained its importance, cultural or political. Though it also being The Good News for economic elites, that could have kept it going, too.

Its position in science is part of that Kulture Kampf but also because it gave biologists something they lacked, a general, central theory that could rival those of Newton and Laplace and Faraday in prestige.  The motive of prestige, which is certainly something scientists thrive on, is way too seldom considered in why scientists do and say what they do.

A combination of those over the years, enforcement of Darwinism as a requirement for maintenance of a career in science and the willful ignoring of the gradual erosion of many of Darwin's contentions - they'd already ignored enormous problems with his theory, so why not continue with that practice - even as rival explanations for how evolution occurred had to have diminished any possible force that "natural selection" had in it, have gotten us to where we are, today.  Those start with the undeniable position that chance had in creating new species, something Darwin, himself, and his atheist-materialist disciples ideologically insist is part of it, though not as the actual "mechanism" of species creation.

The fact is, Charles Darwin and scientists up to and including Frances Arnold have not made a connection between the artificial selection by which human beings from time immemorial intentionally plan and carry out among captive populations of organisms according to intelligent design in which they control everything from original intent to achieving of their goal (when that works) and what they claim happens in nature as a result of a "natural selection" in which, according to their ideological assertions, nature is a mindless something which doesn't have goals, doesn't plan, doesn't actually have the consciousness to choose - the very act of selection - and without intent enforces that very odd invention of not-selecting selection. 

It would be a very odd thing if two things which are nothing alike, this mindless, purposeless, unintentionally acting "nature" doing that thing which Darwin called "selection" and human beings, being conscious beings having purpose and intent and minds using all of those mental processes to do the animal breeding that Darwin claims is a rapid demonstration of natural selection were, in fact, the same thing.  I think it makes more sense to consider the conscious human breeding of new varieties more in terms of an industrial process than anything that happens in nature.

Perhaps it's not surprising such an inbred culture of biological science that can attribute an act requiring purpose to a theoretical entity they insist has no purpose would, in the fullness of time and the accretion of generations of decadence, come up with stuff like the current and idiotic atheist philosophical dogma of eliminative materialism that denies the reality of the human consciousness that creates eliminative materialism.  A dogma so philosophically inept that it could only possibly be true if it were false but which can be held by people holding academic positions considered intellectually reputable.   That such complete and utter nonsense can be asserted - on the alleged basis of science - in an academic setting and as a matter of intellectual repute should win such an academic and intellectual culture a dunce cap instead of an oak wreath in history.  It makes the follies of scholastic academic culture look like minor follies.  Modernism is no less decadent, though earlier in its history it might have seemed fresher.

Darwin's assertion, everywhere, depends on the vaguest of definitions of nature and selection and all of the attributes and actions involved in its "selection".  It requires more wiggle room than a can of bait. That vagueness is exactly what Alfred Russell Wallace, his co-inventor of natural selection, complained about and which Darwin and he tautologically resorted to Herbert Spencer to bypass.  In the case of human beings and what defined the word "selection", we have a far more complete knowledge of what those are and, if one thing is obvious, in human breeding of lines of animals and plants and, now, bacteria*, the action is nothing like what the atheist, ideological contentions about natural selection are.

I think the safest assumption to make isn't that natural selection is a thing in nature, it is that it is entirely a product of the imagination of a British aristocratic who explicitly, on his own testimony, rested his theory on the economic depravity of one of the prophets of the British class system, Malthus. 

Entirely too little investigation of the intellectual foundations of Darwinism is done, I think something in line with the methods of modern Biblical scholarship in which the things that the Biblical text were based in, when those can be known, are taken into effect.  In that case it is one of the older practices of atheists to use parallel stories and ideas written on clay tablets or in hieroglyphs to those found in Genesis to scoff at and debunk the Bible, anachronistically applying standards of modern reading and culture to those books, as well.

Why isn't it isn't as valid to look at the claims of science, especially those sciences as incomplete and inexact as a Darwinian telling of the story of evolution according to the same principles and practices of scholarship?  Darwinism is a long series of invented scenarios explaining things which happened in the lost past and which are not recoverable and, so, can't be checked by observation.  It is, from start to finish, from alpha to omega, an act of human imagination done by human beings who are inescapably people of their time, their circumstances, their cultures, including the culture of science they came up in.  That scientists, trained in the thinking of Darwinism, can't come up with alternative stories to explain contemporary observations isn't very surprising, especially as anything they come up with must be in line with that very Darwinism or it will be discounted and those who propose such explanations ridiculed and dismissed from polite and academic life.  It would be surprising if they were able to come up with alternative explanations and those who had were listened to and taken seriously.

Well, I'm not telling some other story and I don't have anything to lose by way of profession and I don't give the slightest care about the ridicule or the scoffing.  I'm just someone who looked at the primary evidence and am reporting on what it says and what its position in history has been.   I don't feel even slightly obliged to uphold Darwinist orthodoxy, especially when I look at how many millions of people have been killed through an explanation that what the killers were doing was in line with the workings of nature.

*  I have seen no discussion of the fact that Frances Arnold wasn't working with natural organisms but bacteria which had been artificially created by inserting bits of alien DNA into them.  They were intelligently designed organisms which were, further, intelligently selected to produce a desired outcome.   If anything her work was more definitively removed from the natural world than the work of the hundreds of generations of people who bred sheep and cattle and dogs and house cats and corn and wheat, who were working with organisms which hadn't been so artificially altered by modern science.