NATURAL SELECTION-WHAT CAN IT DO?

Natural Selection

Charles Darwin’s famous book is fully titled

“Of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in The Struggle For Life.”

To this day NATURAL SELECTION is put forward as the key mechanism of evolution. In fact, natural selection wasn’t a particularly new or even very radical idea and had been written up by Edward Blyth 23 years prior to the publication of Origin of Species. Blyth was a creationist and Darwin borrowed the idea of natural selection from him and interpreted it differently.

It is essential to study and understand exactly what natural selection is, and consider what it can and more importantly, cannot, do. We will examine the basic principles of natural selection and consider several examples which can be observed and tested.

Natural selection-variation within species
Can it explain new kinds of animal or plant?
Natural selection is accepted by all creationists as a fact
Natural selection completely consistent with Biblical Creation
Natural Selection is a CONSERVATIVE not creative mechanism

Darwin used several examples of variation within species in Origin of Species, with particular reference to the breeding of domestic animals. He pointed out that farmers and breeders had always bred from their best stock, whether pigeons, cattle or other animal, and prevented the less suitable from breeding. By this means, pigeons which could tumble in flight, cattle which gave more or better milk or meat had been produced. The central argument of his book is that since some changes could be produced by selective breeding in this way, it could be assumed that all living things could have come into being through millions of gradual changes from that common ancestor, all through natural selection, in an unbroken branching ‘tree of life’.

It is vital to understand that Darwinists, intelligent design advocates and young earth creationists are all agreed that natural selection does occur, can be observed, and can explain some things in nature. The disagreement occurs over whether or not natural selection can account for all living things descending with variation from an original primitive organism (see abiogenesis for discussion about the plausibility of such supposed original primitive organism arising without design).

Key fact: natural selection cannot MAKE anything

                      – it can only ELIMINATE things

The term ‘differential survival’ means the same thing as natural selection. It just describes the observable fact that some animals survive better than others in different circumstances. Yes, but so what?

To select means to make a choice between 2 or more alternatives. For example, we hear about the ‘England cricket selectors’. These men choose between the available county cricket players to decide who will make up the England cricket team. Based on performance in county games and other factors, the selectors aim is to pick the players to make up a team which in their intelligent view is most likely to win the cricket struggle. The best eleven plus substitutes are chosen, the rest rejected, so choosing a team is as much about rejection is it is about selection.

The SELECTORS pick and choose, the PLAYERS emerge from the county cricket scene. Selection does not produce the players, it only decides which ones will play Pakistan and Australia etc. A completely different process produces the players, and without them the selectors would have nothing to work with and there could be no English cricket team, or indeed cricket, at all.

In natural selection, some animals or plants in any given environment will do better than others in the struggle for life. The prize for the winner is to survive and reproduce successfully, passing on its genes. The loser ultimately dies, or at least declines, although it may come back if the local environment changes, or it moves somewhere else it can do better in the prevailing conditions. Natural selection explains why one lives and one dies, but does not explain where either came from in the first place.

Peppered moths are an ‘icon of evolution’ which are still taught to schoolchildren as an example of evolution in action. They are in fact (despite serious questions about the researcher Kettlewell’s methodology and bias) a good example of natural selection where environmental change has led to changes in a population (sometimes called adaptation).

The Peppered moth biston betularia comes in two forms, the dark and the light. In fact, there is quite a range of colour from dark to light, just as we see colour variations in many living things of a single species. Dark moths are more easily seen when resting on light coloured tree trunks so they are more likely to be eaten by birds, the opposite is true for light coloured moths, who are camouflaged on light coloured trees such as the silver birch in a natural state. During a time of severe industrial pollution, the trees in industrial regions turned dark, so the darker moths were better camouflaged and the light ones eaten more. As a result, during a time of severe pollution the proportion of different types changed from light to dark. When the air was cleaned up, the darker moths lost their selective advantage and so the light variety came to predominate once more.

This is said to prove evolution. As has been discussed, this very much depends on what you mean by evolution. No change has taken place except in relative proportions-light peppered moths are still light peppered moths, dark peppered moths are still dark peppered moths, and both are still biston betularia. No genetic changes has occurred, so it is extremely misleading to say that evolution has occurred at all in this case, unless you define evolution as a change in the proportion of 2 sub populations of varieties within a species in response to environmental change.

Of course, this is a classic trick (bait and switch) which Darwin used frequently in Origin of Species-prove a very simple case and then pretend it proves something else which it doesn’t. The peppered moths could cross and re-cross and be subject to natural selection for a hundred billion years, but would only evolve into anything other than a peppered moth if new coherent information bearing genetic materialappeared in the DNA ( the likelihood of this is discussed elsewhere) to code for something other than a peppered moth. It is therefore very misleading to refer to the peppered moth as an example of evolution. It is an example of cyclical change in a relatively minor feature within a species. This kind of change can not get us from a bacterium to an elephant. Its just a change in gene proportion, not gene nature.

A present day example of natural selection concerns crayfish. The native British crayfish is a crustacean that lives in clean flowing rivers especially southern English chalk streams. It used to be very common, anglers such as Fred J Taylor wrote about catching scores of them in baited traps during fishing trips, mainly as bait for fish such as chub, but anglers often caught so many they cooked them to eat (Fred J Taylor, ‘One for the pot’). Somebody regrettably introduced the American Signal crayfish into Britain. It is larger and more aggressive than the native crayfish, and can live in dirtier water.

Native crayfish were already declining through pollution and reduced water flows, but at the present time the American crayfish are spreading strongly through our waterways and displacing the native species from its habitat. I saw people catching them in the Thames near Oxford. They are huge compared to our native crayfish, with much larger claws. Worse still, the signal crayfish invaders carry an infection which kills native British crayfish but to which they are immune. It is likely that within 50 years or less, the invaders will completely displace our native crayfish which will then become extinct in Britain. That seems a great pity to me, but as Darwin said‘Nature looks on with indifference, indeed with satisfaction, as weaker forms are rendered extinct in the struggle for life.’
The situation regarding the grey and red squirrel is very similar, where again a more vigorous foreign invader introduced by man across a natural barrier (in this case, the Atlantic Ocean) successfully competes with and displaces a native species in what Darwin called ‘The struggle for life.’ These are two classic examples of ‘struggle for existence’ natural selection but no evolution is taking place.

Darwin wrote a lot about extinctions, and there is no doubt that they have occurred, as we can see. There is no disagreement between evolutionists and creationists about natural selection and extinctions, the case depends on repeatable observations and is quite clear. The 2 examples above could be used to argue that Darwin’s theory has been validated as it has made predictions concerning events which occurred much later than his book was published. As far as extinctions and the ‘preservation of favoured races’ go, this is perfectly true.

But these examples of natural selection in action today tell us ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about how either  squirrels or crayfish originally came to exist. This is equally true for all other known examples of natural selection. It is impossible to over emphasise the importance of this, since the observable fact of natural selection is often claimed to support the philosophical speculation of molecules to man evolution. The two things are quite distinct and should not be confused, although they regularly are. This is the Darwinian’s big lie. Perhaps it is unfair to say they are lying, but they are certainly wrong and I believe culpably so since it’s not that difficult to understand that changes in populations or gene frequency due to the strong displacing the weak are not a creative, but merely selective process.

In ‘Origin’, Darwin gives us several examples of non-natural selection, in other words selective breeding by humans. He chooses the example of fancy pigeons and explains how pigeon breeders desiring to produce certain characteristics in their birds (for example, fan tails or the ability to ‘tumble’ in flight) choose suitable male and female pigeons to breed from, and select the best offspring for their purpose to breed from. (Remember, evolution has no purpose, memory, foresight or plan-unlike animal breeders, so it is not a very fair comparison). Less suitable pigeons, not showing the chosen characteristic, are eliminated or at least not bred from. This way, over many generations, certain desired characteristics are selected for.

This process can be seen at work throughout the world where plantsmen and women and animal breeders have produced many varieties through selective breeding and elimination which are not found wild in the natural world. Examples could be multiplied-apples, wheat, dogs, ornamental carp, cattle. All wheat for example is derived from various wild grasses which have been selectively bred so that they are ideal for producing food. There are over 6,000 different varieties of apple, but they are all one species and no apple pip ever grew into anything that wasn’t an apple during recorded human history.

Cruft’s famous annual dog show demonstrates how many different sorts of dogs have been bred (some of them so fragile that they cannot breed naturally but require artificial insemination and/or Caesarian section). It is important to note however that apples are always apples, however many times they are crossed and re-crossed. The same is true for grasses, dogs, roses, sheep, cattle and humans. And of the man made varieties are left to themselves, they breed back to mongrels in a very few generations. Darwin knew this very well as he wrote of it,so why did he conclude that natural selection could produce more varieties than human selection when the plain data in front of him showed the complete opposite?

The Bible teaches that God made all the plants and animals ‘according to their kinds’. The expression ‘according to their kind…in each was seed which produced according to it’s kind..etc is used half a dozen times in the Genesis account. It is as if God knew (which of course He did) that the Biblical account would later come under attack, so He wanted to make Himself perfectly clear. In fact, what we observe today is that plants and animals reproduce ‘according to their kinds’. But what exactly is a ‘kind’? It is not made absolutely clear in Genesis, but an appeal to common sense, and the Bible was written for common people, suggests that a ‘kind’ is broader than a species but narrower than a family. For example, dog-kind, grass-kind, apple-kind, cattle-kind, horse-kind and of course human-kind. Each of these ‘kinds’ has considerable genetic potential within itself to produce variations, but still essentially breeds true within limits.

Looking at the Biblical account, taken together with the fossil record and observations of life today, it is perfectly possible to suggest that horses, zebras, wild asses, donkeys etc may have ‘descended with variation’ from an original pair of horses with perfect and multipotent DNA which came from the hand of God. Darwin argues that as populations drifted apart or became separated, speciation came about as new features developed. An alternative Biblical take, which fits the facts better, is that as creatures spread out from Eden, and again from Noah’s Ark, breeding groups of them LOST DNA as the alleles (alternative genes for the same characteristic) which best suited the local environment were selected for. Divergent ‘evolution’ if you like, due to splitting. This can explain why we have mountain asses, zebras, and various horses each of which is ideally suited for the place where they are naturally found. It also explains why we find black people naturally settled in Africa and Australia, where their skin protects against the sun which causes such a problem with skin cancer in white people (I have written a leaflet on this for the Creation Science Movement which can be obtained from their web site). God loves variety and allowed for it in the original design.

Each population is using the genes out of the original pack which suits it best where it lives. We can see this happening today and it doesn’t take long. So ‘downhill’ natural selection and speciation (formation of species/distinct varieties) is no problem for the young earth creationist who interprets Genesis literally, while if we look at the problem the other way round, the evolutionist, who has to explain ‘uphill’ speciation, has to tell us how the new non-random, specified digital information in the DNA which codes for new species arises by random DNA mutations. He can’t do it.

Darwin argued that all known sorts of pigeon are descended with modification from a common pigeon ancestor, the rock dove. This is perfectly plausible within a young earth creation model, but they are still all one pigeon species if they can breed to produce fertile young, even if artificial insemination is required.

All known dogs may possibly have come from a common dog ancestor, certainly the dog genome has remarkable possibilities for variety within itself, but they are still all dogs and can interbreed with dogs to make more dogs. Artificial selection has produced many changes within species, but no new species. Natural selection rearranges genes that already exist but does not create the new genetic information that would be required to change from one kind of organism to another, or develop abilities beyond the potential limits of the gene pool of the creature in question. According to Darwinian evolution, the emergence of this new genetic information would have to arise by chance, before it could be selected for or against. This has never been observed, nor is there any scientific reason to expect that it would happen.

Examples of natural selection could be multiplied. It certainly occurs, but cannot account for the origin of new kinds of plant or animal since this would require new coherent genetic information. Natural selection cannot provide this, Darwin didn’t even pretend that it could, for he wrote ‘Without the variations, natural selection has nothing to work on.’ Obviously this is true. 

At the end of the day, natural selection is just a term to describe the fact that less successful animals succeed less well, the term ‘differential survival’ or ‘survival of the fittest’ describes it just as well. It is NOT a creative mechanism, for that the evolutionist must rely on mutations, which are considered elsewhere in this site. 

So, next time you hear a Darwinist saying that species originated through natural selection, ask him or her how natural selection produces new features that were not in the DNA of the original species. He will probably bluster, make some bold unsubstantiated assertion or appeal to authority and then if you come back will most likely call you rude names. What he won’t be able to do is give a scientifically coherent answer that solves the problem.

Natural selection should really be called natural REJECTION, since all it really does is eliminate the less fit. It can tell us NOTHING about where we or any species came from. It is a conservative, not a progressive or creative mechanism; Darwin himself wrote that‘Without variations, natural selection has nothing to work on.’ He was evidently right on that point. The variations are either cyclical due to differential expression of previously existing alleles (different versions of the same gene) in which case this is not molecules to man evolution, or else they must be created by random mutations. This is not observed to happen, nor is there any realistic mechanism for it to happen since random changes to  meaningfully complex sytems such as DNA usually messes them up, as Intelligent Design theory predicts.

In conclusion

Natural selection or ‘survival of the fittest’ is a conservative sorting mechanism which explains for example the variations in finch beaks on different Galapagos islands but cannot explain how those finches came to be. As Darwin admited, it created nothing but only conserved variations which have come into existence by other means (of which Darwin knew nothing but we now know could only be due tochance mutations). The explanatory power of natural selection has been very greatly exaggerated.