On Reconciling Atheism and Meaning in the Universe

[LTX]

112. What I am saying is not the product of "willful ignorance."

It is a topic of considerable debate, and not inconsiderable importance. The idea that natural selection is probabilistic has a rather long history, and the idea that natural selection is indeed stochastic has mathematical modeling ramifications.

Ernst Mayr utilized a probabilistic conception of natural selection:

Natural selection is a statistical phenomenon; it means merely that the better genotype has a ‘better chance of surviving’ (Darwin). A light-colored individual in a species of moth with industrial melanism may survive in a sooty area and reproduce, but its chances of doing so are far less than those of a blackish, cryptically colored individual. It happens not infrequently in nature that, for one reason or another, a superior individual fails to reproduce while an inferior one does so abundantly … Natural selection, being a statistical phenomenon, is not deterministic; its effects are not rigorously predictable."

In more recent writings, he asserts that “selection and chance are not two mutually exclusive alternatives…there are stochastic perturbations (“chance events”) during every stage of the selection process.”

To the extent that natural selection as a discrete process is susceptible to modeling at all (an initial question for which there are widely divergent views), the frankly random elements within the process will have to yield (it seems to me) to some variation of a Feigenbaum sequence or period-doubling. Natural selection as a gross process or rule seems otherwise to be simply a tautological escape hatch for observed variation that does not fall within genetic drift.

Science goes nowhere when it is reduced by scriptural adherents to dogmatism.