Last comments: Just because there unanswered questions doesn’t invalidate the theory (if it pleases you). The scientific method requires acceptance of new information and adjustment of formerly held views as necessary; one hopes resulting in a closer approach to the truth. As far as the mechanism for Natural Selection is concerned, my understanding is that it is largely survival of the fittest and chance mutation.
My last comments; I never said the theory was invalid; it’s a reasonable set of postulants to Darwin’s observations. The scientific method requires VERIFICATION of new information, not acceptance.
Darwin’s theories should always be looked at with the same critical eye physicists now use for Einstein’s.
“As far as the mechanism for Natural Selection is concerned, my understanding is that it is largely survival of the fittest and chance mutation.” ~ luvbach1
FYI:
“Evolution by natural selection in the classical sense—unguided, with no transcendent agent to direct mutations along “certain beneficial lines,” as Asa Gray put it, hasn’t a clue about how to explain religion—or mathematics, or philosophy, or our ability to do science, for that matter. Evolution might or might not be able to account for the complexity of our brains, per se, but it’s mute and powerless to “explain” the higher products of our brains, which are of course by far the most complex objects yet known to us anywhere in the universe. Many agnostic and atheist philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists have stated this much in frank terms. Our ability to do higher mathematics, for example, was utterly irrelevant to our survival in evolutionary terms—our ancestors needed to know absolutely nothing about topology or fractals, manifolds or tensors, even differential calculus, in order to outwit mammoths and saber-tooth tigers. Nor did they need to know the profoundly shocking fact (from the point of view of naturalism) that mathematics of the kinds just mentioned is incredibly powerful for understanding the external world—a fact that just cries out for a deeper explanation. Pinker, Dawkins, Dennett and company are flying into the face of the facts on this one. We can not only do mathematics, but our mathematics actually matches the subtlest details of the external world. How does this make any sense at all, if we aren’t in a very real sense created in the image of God, the divine mathematician (as Kepler, Galileo, and Copernicus regarded God) who also created the external world?” ~ Ted Davis 3/24/08 Professor of the History of Science
Here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1990848/posts?page=7#7