Physicalist philosopher Daniel Dennett likes to say that natural selection is the single best idea anyone ever had.
From Jonathan Wells’s series on the fractured fairytales of schoolbook Darwinism, here’s what’s wrong (assuming you don’t need natural selection in order to prop up physicalism):
Darwin had no real evidence for natural selection as a driver of evolutionary change, to produce all the variety of life, as he claimed. Later followers have tried many lines of evidence, including the famous, and reverenced, Galapagos finches:
Better evidence for natural selection came from finches in the Galápagos Islands in the 1970s. The islands were home to what biologists listed as 13 different species of finches, and biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant and their colleagues studied one of these on a single island. The Grants and their colleagues kept detailed records of each finch species’ anatomy, including the length and depth of their beaks. When a severe drought in 1977 killed many of the islands’ plants, about 85 percent of the birds died. The Grants and their colleagues noted that the survivors had beaks that were, on average, 5 percent larger than the population average before the drought, presumably because the surviving birds were better able to crack the tough seeds left by the drought. In other words, the shift was due to natural selection. The Grants estimated that if a similar drought occurred every ten years, the birds’ beaks would continue to get larger until they would qualify as a new species in 200 years.
The Arrival of the Fittest
When the drought ended and the rains returned, however, food was plentiful, and the average beak size returned to normal. No net evolution had occurred. Nevertheless, “Darwin’s finches” found their way into most biology textbooks as evidence for evolution by natural selection.
So there is evidence for natural selection, but like domestic breeding, it has never been observed to produce anything more than microevolution. As Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries wrote in 1904, “Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.”
Jonathan Wells, “Top Scientific Problems with Evolution: Natural Selection” at Evolution News and Science Today (February 15, 2022)
You may also wish to read: Jonathan Wells rates homology as one of the top scientific problems with evolution theory. Similarity of features is taken to be due to common descent. Wells: “Yet animals and plants possess many features that are similar in structure and position but are clearly not derived from a common ancestor with those features. The camera eye of a vertebrate and the camera eye of a squid or octopus are remarkably similar, but no one thinks they were inherited from a common ancestor that possessed a camera eye.”
and
Jonathan Wells: Why molecular phylogeny is a problem in evolution. Wells: If two sequences can be aligned in more than one way, then any comparison will depend heavily on what alignment the investigator chooses. And when many sequences are compared, as they are in molecular phylogenies, the problem becomes much worse.