Well, then it sure isn’t “evolution” as National Geographic understands it. This just in from Andreas Wagner at Aeon: How do random DNA changes lead to innovation? Darwin’s concept of natural selection, although crucial to understand evolution, doesn’t help much. The thing is, selection can only spread innovations that already exist. The botanist Hugo de Vries said it best in 1905: ‘Natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.’ (Half a century earlier, Darwin had already admitted that calling variations random is just another way of admitting that we don’t know their origins.) A metaphor might help to clarify the problem. Imagine a giant library of books containing all possible … Continue reading Evolution needs a library of Platonic forms?