There is a story once told to me by a music major, in the same program I was who, as we all were, was required to take German in college. He said that the teacher was giving a vocabulary test at the end of the second week.
She, a German immigrant of the intellectual type who got a job at a rural land-grant university, told the students to spell the words she said and to give their definition in English.
Before she could start one of the students raised his hand and when she asked what was wrong he said, I learned how to spell them but I didn't think you wanted us to say what they mean.
After an interval of stunned silence she shook her head and muttered, "I really don't know how some of you got into college."
And so I find myself asking how so many college-credentialed people of the English speaking people can be so friggin' stupid!
A. Anyone who doesn't understand that the total lack of scientific understanding of the development of form in organisms is an enormous, I'd say prohibitive, problem for the question of evolution, clearly combines the phonemes "evolution" without knowing, literally, the first thing about what it means.
The identification of species is, first and last a question of differences in forms - with a bunch of other considerations coming between. How that happens could not possibly be more relevant to an understanding of evolution and it is not understood how it happens now, in the scientifically observable present, even more so unobserved and so not understood in the totally unobservable billions of years during which species evolved, creating all the other classifications of life on Earth.
That lack of knowledge makes even the most universally adopted claims of understanding evolution stupendously premature. And, yet, we're supposed to believe and profess to believe that good ol' Darwin friggin' nailed it in 1859.
B. Richard Lewontin has also, in writing and in some excellent and fascinating taped lectures which you can hear on Youtube and Vimeo, in which he discusses the idiocy of claims about "genes" determining the organism. He notes, for example, that the one thing that "everyone knows" that genes make proteins is a grotesque simplification because on their own they don't do that. For example, genes don't fold the chains of amino acids into biologically active proteins within the cell, something he attributed to "cellular chemistry," something I suspect is a convenient name for something which will probably turn out to be so massively complex and varied that calling it one thing is a distortion.
I think, since we know that, among other things, form in an organisms is influenced, in some way, on what happens in the molecular activity in cells that every aspect of that could well be a strong force in the evolution of species, the variations of those myriads of happenings on the cellular level having more of an effect than "natural selection". If there are other aspects of morphogenesis that cannot be shoved under the umbrella of natural selection, I'd think that would completely discredit the theory. Rupert Sheldrake's theory of it seems to me to totally discredit materialist monism, which is one of the foremost motives in the adoption of and enforced adherence to natural selection.
C. We know that how organisms behave has an effect on their rates of reproduction, or, rather, a possible effect, in many, if not most "behaviors". So any unknown aspects of behavior and the mental activity related to that is a major "unknowable" in any evolutionary theory. It was the motive of the Sociobiologists, the evolutionary psychologists and Hamiltonians who preceded them to force behaviors that couldn't be made compatible with natural selections under the umbrella.
D. We know that in acts such as predation that chance, having absolutely nothing to do with the genetics or "fitness" of the preyed upon species, plays a huge role in the evolution of the preyed upon species. Though there may be complex factors in such things which would bring genetics into the picture, though through the filters of all of those cellular and morphogenic factors already mentioned, which have an effect on that, the event in many cases will have more to do with things like chance, where the two animals were at the time of the event, the preyed upon and its killer, which have absolutely nothing to do with biological fitness or genes.
(I will forego the chance to tout my piece eviscerating Dawkin's "first bird to call out" fable, but here's the link.)
E. This is a very partial list of problems with your assertion, I haven't talked about others, genetic drift, any certainly similar and as yet not identified complications. Maybe some that aren't similar.
I think, literally, there are probably as many contributing factors to the evolution of species as there are factors in the combination of those arising from genetic chemistry, morphogensis, behavior, chance, the combinations of those producing different results, etc. I think that calling all of that "natural selection" produces only an appearance of solving a problem by pretending you have. It is an act of reification, perhaps the one most colossal one in the history of science. In popular use, it is a created god, and some of that popular use of it gets called and treated as "science".
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