Southack's Top Ten Rules for maintaining the Invincible Superstition:You're doing pretty good, even if you're no gore3000. Did he teach you these?1) Pretend not to comprehend any relevant information.
2) Compartmentalize all facts to prevent comparison.
3) Anything that can be easily understood by someone with a third grade education is automatically nonsense.
4) No lie is too big if it supports the superstition.
5) Keep the mind free of any knowledge of the basic subject matter so as not to lose sight of the superstition.
6) Take everything out of context.
7) The rules of logic and evidence were made to be broken.
8) Never discuss randomness and selection together.
9) Never doubt the superstition.
10) When in doubt, see rule #9.
I particularly like number 8. So many Cs like to chirp on "randomness doesn't go anywhere." (Yes it does, with the square root of the number of iterations/generations.) "Survival of the fittest is a tautology, 'The survivors survive.'" Algebra is full of tautologies, but you get to things you didn't know fooling around with them.
Anyway, the joint operation of variation and selection isn't really random and isn't a tautology.
I never bothered to catalog Gore3000's rules because he seemed to have one crucial mandate in every post -- never use any scientific jargon correctly. This made it almost impossible to argue with him because you never knew quite what he meant to say except that he was always certainly wrong. Fixing his nomenclature mistakes took all the effort I could muster but that still left him safely in possession of whatever conceptual errors permanently clouded his thinking.