Natural Selection is an Oxymoron

I want to sincerely thank Sagey for an incredibly informative, well researched, and logically methodical presentation. This was a very thorough, well referenced, scholarly argument! Unfortunately, most of this argument belongs to a different debate. For the most part, Sagey offered a comprehensive defense of the scope and power of natural selection. As I stated earlier, this is not that debate. As I also said, it is a debate I would be very happy to have; all the more so, now that I know the formidable ability and passion Sagey possesses for this subject. This is a far more modest debate. It's a debate on nothing more than definition. Is the term "natural selection" an oxymoron? To answer this question, we really need to cite nothing more than the dictionary. I used Merriam Webster online. Here are the relevant definitions: oxymoron: a combination of words that have opposite or very different meanings. natural: existing in nature and not made or caused by people: coming from nature selection: the act of choosing something or someone from a group. There you have it! Natural describes what just happens. It happens naturally without purposeful, active intervention. Selection, on the other hand, is a deliberate choice. Selection is active purposeful choice - exactly what does not happen in nature. Thus, natural selection is, by definition, an oxymoron. For example, water naturally flows downstream. We make a selection, or a choice, to dig a trench to divert it to our vegetable garden. The stream flows naturally. The trench is an active selection. It is not natural. Similarly, organisms live and die. Selective breeders actively intervene into this natural process. They desire particular phenotypic outcomes. Therefore, they actively intervene, breeding certain animals for a purpose, for example, breeding horses for speed. The faster the progeny, the more they are bred and preserved by the breeders. No such process goes on in nature. Natural outcomes simply happen. There is no selection. No choice is made. Sagey is pretty accurate when he says: "If a change improves the species ability to perform (survival enhancing traits), then likely those with improvements will have a better chance of survival..." Yep. That's pretty much it. Different creatures reproduce differentially. I can't emphasize this enough: it just happens But when he says, "This chance for survival and domination in that environment is a Selection process," he is confusing the fact that we have adapted the term "natural selection" to describe what is happening with the natural unfolding of differential survival and reproduction. Nothing is being actively selected. It is simply happening. Origin of Life researcher David Abel says it well: "The environment cannot select for isolated function. The environment is blind to functionality. It has no preference for function over non-function. The environment has no capacity for caring whether the fittest organisms survive better. They just do."[3] Even the Darwin quote that Sagey provided us with is presented as a metaphor (I'm not paranoid, the environment really IS always scrutinizing me!). The environment doesn't care. Therefore it doesn't select. It just happens. You are free to call it what you wish, but if you wish to call it Natural Selection, you are employing the rhetorical device that we call oxymoron. There's nothing wrong with it. We use oxymoron's all the time: random choice, honest thief, noticeable absence, etc. etc. Natural Selection fits in to this list. It just happens! [3] "The First Gene," Abel, 2011, p 167 Preemptive note: Merriam Webster provides a definition for the word selection that matches that which we call natural selection. Please note that this definition is tied directly to the term natural selection.