Phillip Johnson

Category:TauTology
=== Darwin on Trail ===
It is not difficult to understand how leading Darwinists were led toformulate natural selection as a tautology. The contemporaryneo-Darwinian synthesis grew out of population genetics, a fieldanchored in mathematics and concerned with demonstrating how rapidlyvery small mutational advantages could spread in a population. Theadvantages in question were assumptions in a theorem, not qualitiesobserved in nature, and the mathematicians naturally tended to thinkof them as "whatever it was that caused the organism and itsdescendants to produce more offspring than other members of thespecies." This way of thinking spread to the zoologists andpaleontologists, who found it convenient to assume that theirguiding theory was simply true by definition. As long as outsidecritics were not paying attention, the absurdity of the tautologyformulation was in no danger of exposure.What happened to change this situation is that Popper's commentreceived a great deal of publicity, and creationists and otherunfriendly critics began citing it to support their contention thatDarwinism is not really a scientific theory. The Darwinists themselvesbecame aware of a dangerous situation, and thereafter criticsraising the tautology claim were firmly told that they were simplydemonstrating their inability to understand Darwinism. As we shall seein later chapters, however, in practice natural selection continues tobe employed in its tautological formulation.If the concept of natural selection were really only a tautology Icould end the chapter at this point, because a piece of emptyrepetition obviously does not have the power to guide anevolutionary process in its long journey from the first replicatingmacro-molecule to modern human beings. But although naturalselection can be formulated as a tautology, and often has been, it canalso be formulated in other ways that are not so easily dismissed.We must go on to consider these other possibilities.
=== Notes ===
Pending