Then you should take that up with @nwrickert who said we should look at natural selection as “building on success.”
And I didn’t see you disagree that evolution in general influences how you think about the world.
But how is it not what you were arguing about “building on success”?
I started this post because the philosophy of Darwinism bleeds into biology and how biologists think. From my perspective, it’s keeping them and you from ignoring obvious problems with the science.
I see you @Rumraket as correctly understanding neutral theory and so you appeal to natural selection. I see others as understanding natural selection doesn’t have that much power and so think there must be more beneficial mutations and so don’t really understand neutral theory. And/or I see others that assume everyone else knows there are problems, but you’re just working on figuring them out. I see lots of contradictions and it starts to make me feel like I’m going crazy - as it shouldn’t be me that sees the problems in science, it should be scientists.
Look how Mayr agrees with me about what natural selection is.
The discovery of natural selection, by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, must itself be counted as an extraordinary philosophical advance. The principle remained unknown throughout the more than 2,000-year history of philosophy ranging from the Greeks to Hume, Kant and the Victorian era. The concept of natural selection had remarkable power for explaining directional and adaptive changes. Its nature is simplicity itself. It is not a force like the forces described in the laws of physics; its mechanism is simply the elimination of inferior individuals. This process of nonrandom elimination impelled Darwin’s contemporary, philosopher Herbert Spencer, to describe evolution with the now familiar term “survival of the fittest.” (This description was long ridiculed as circular reasoning: “Who are the fittest? Those who survive.” In reality, a careful analysis can usually determine why certain individuals fail to thrive in a given set of conditions.)
Darwin pointed out that creation, as described in the Bible and the origin accounts of other cultures, was contradicted by almost any aspect of the natural world. Every aspect of the “wonderful design” so admired by the natural theologians could be explained by natural selection. (A closer look also reveals that design is often not so wonderful—see “Evolution and the Origins of Disease,” by Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams; Scientific American , November 1998.) Eliminating God from science made room for strictly scientific explanations of all natural phenomena; it gave rise to positivism; it produced a powerful intellectual and spiritual revolution, the effects of which have lasted to this day.
this is perhaps Darwin’s greatest contribution—he developed a set of new principles that influence the thinking of every person: the living world, through evolution, can be explained without recourse to supernaturalism; essentialism or typology is invalid, and we must adopt population thinking, in which all individuals are unique (vital for education and the refutation of racism); natural selection, applied to social groups, is indeed sufficient to account for the origin and maintenance of altruistic ethical systems;