****Nature in place of the human does the selecting of traits and variations in traits, and anoints the fittest to survive who then pass these skills and traits to offspring. Over long periods of time due to Malthusian competition and the accumulation of these beneficial traits, selected by nature, new species form.****
Of course, one major problem here is that the functional biological structures we seek to explain are not an accumulation of traits/variations/mutations, and so cannot in logical principle be explained by the accumulation of traits, and especially not an accidental accumulation.
You can "build" three gallons of water by accumulating three one-gallon quantities of water. But you cannot build an eye simply by accumulating any subset of an eye, and the same goes for every other functional biological structure in existence. You need specific components and they have to be put together in a specific way. And particularly where multicellular life is concerned, building each such structure also entails building the embryonic process by which that structure is built from a single cell.
Hence, a blind process that "accumulates" existing variations via them happening to survive well in a given environment goes precisely 0% of the way in providing a logical explanation of how functional biological structures come to exist, regardless of how much time is postulated. A variation being "beneficial" in a randomly-occurring environment does not make it any more likely to be useful towards some as-yet-unrealized future functional structure than its being "deleterious" or "neutral."
Implicitly, to even *begin* to have a coherent explanation, you need an agent with foresight who selects things now with an eye towards future goals, as human designers do. This was the point of coining the phrase "natural selection" - to encourage people to think of blind natural forces as being such an agent (while officially denying it), to make it seem subjectively plausible that they could create biological function.
And even if you DO have such an agent, it's still not enough, because functional biological structures exist as intrinsic and essential parts of whole biological substances in way that human technology cannot achieve.
****In Darwin’s world, only the material matters. Complexity does not exist, and all creatures are rather simple with similar homological designs which can be transmutated naturally and materially over time.****
I think this is also essential to understanding how Darwin could have possibly come to believe that functional biological structures are formed by accidental "accumulation" of "beneficial" traits. First, as just mentioned, he fooled himself into conceptualizing blind environmental causes as an agent with foresight, goals, and intentions. His modern successors all do the same thing.
But second, he deluded himself into believing that living things are VASTLY simpler than they really are. For instance, it's well-known that Darwin thought that single-celled organisms were mere bags of "protoplasm," the sort of thing that might come to spontaneously exist by lightning striking a pond.
This was always a frankly stupid belief. Even without modern microscope technology, it should have been intuitively obvious to Darwin that a bag of undifferentiated goo couldn't possibly come close to doing all of the things that a living organism needs to do in order to be alive and reproduce. But at least we can say that his belief in the simplicity of such organisms didn't yet directly contradict observations at the time.
What I think goes unappreciated is that Darwin had the same view about everything else in biology. Just as he thought a single-celled organism was simple enough that it might spontaneously arise by lightning striking a pond given enough time, so he thought every other biological trait could arise in similar fashion. For instance, he thought that light-sensitive spots complete with optical nerves were simple enough that such a thing could pop into existence by chance variation *in a single generation* given enough time, and could then be "refined" by natural selection in the following generations.
And once refined, he imagined that an eyeball with a lens and the muscles and nerves necessary to control it could arise by chance from a light-sensitive spot in a single generation given enough time, and then likewise be "refined" by natural selection.
To summarize, Darwin got around the fatal logical problem that functional biological systems are not mere accumulations of parts in two ways: 1) Imagining blind natural forces as an intelligent agent with long-term plans, and 2) Imagining biological function as so simple that they could accidentally pop into existence without accumulation and then be tuned afterwards.
The first of these was always incoherent, and the second one was always foolish and has been thoroughly disproven by direct observation. But Darwin's successors continue on autopilot.
****Nature in place of the human does the selecting of traits and variations in traits, and anoints the fittest to survive who then pass these skills and traits to offspring. Over long periods of time due to Malthusian competition and the accumulation of these beneficial traits, selected by nature, new species form.****
Of course, one major problem here is that the functional biological structures we seek to explain are not an accumulation of traits/variations/mutations, and so cannot in logical principle be explained by the accumulation of traits, and especially not an accidental accumulation.
You can "build" three gallons of water by accumulating three one-gallon quantities of water. But you cannot build an eye simply by accumulating any subset of an eye, and the same goes for every other functional biological structure in existence. You need specific components and they have to be put together in a specific way. And particularly where multicellular life is concerned, building each such structure also entails building the embryonic process by which that structure is built from a single cell.
Hence, a blind process that "accumulates" existing variations via them happening to survive well in a given environment goes precisely 0% of the way in providing a logical explanation of how functional biological structures come to exist, regardless of how much time is postulated. A variation being "beneficial" in a randomly-occurring environment does not make it any more likely to be useful towards some as-yet-unrealized future functional structure than its being "deleterious" or "neutral."
Implicitly, to even *begin* to have a coherent explanation, you need an agent with foresight who selects things now with an eye towards future goals, as human designers do. This was the point of coining the phrase "natural selection" - to encourage people to think of blind natural forces as being such an agent (while officially denying it), to make it seem subjectively plausible that they could create biological function.
And even if you DO have such an agent, it's still not enough, because functional biological structures exist as intrinsic and essential parts of whole biological substances in way that human technology cannot achieve.
****In Darwin’s world, only the material matters. Complexity does not exist, and all creatures are rather simple with similar homological designs which can be transmutated naturally and materially over time.****
I think this is also essential to understanding how Darwin could have possibly come to believe that functional biological structures are formed by accidental "accumulation" of "beneficial" traits. First, as just mentioned, he fooled himself into conceptualizing blind environmental causes as an agent with foresight, goals, and intentions. His modern successors all do the same thing.
But second, he deluded himself into believing that living things are VASTLY simpler than they really are. For instance, it's well-known that Darwin thought that single-celled organisms were mere bags of "protoplasm," the sort of thing that might come to spontaneously exist by lightning striking a pond.
This was always a frankly stupid belief. Even without modern microscope technology, it should have been intuitively obvious to Darwin that a bag of undifferentiated goo couldn't possibly come close to doing all of the things that a living organism needs to do in order to be alive and reproduce. But at least we can say that his belief in the simplicity of such organisms didn't yet directly contradict observations at the time.
What I think goes unappreciated is that Darwin had the same view about everything else in biology. Just as he thought a single-celled organism was simple enough that it might spontaneously arise by lightning striking a pond given enough time, so he thought every other biological trait could arise in similar fashion. For instance, he thought that light-sensitive spots complete with optical nerves were simple enough that such a thing could pop into existence by chance variation *in a single generation* given enough time, and could then be "refined" by natural selection in the following generations.
And once refined, he imagined that an eyeball with a lens and the muscles and nerves necessary to control it could arise by chance from a light-sensitive spot in a single generation given enough time, and then likewise be "refined" by natural selection.
To summarize, Darwin got around the fatal logical problem that functional biological systems are not mere accumulations of parts in two ways: 1) Imagining blind natural forces as an intelligent agent with long-term plans, and 2) Imagining biological function as so simple that they could accidentally pop into existence without accumulation and then be tuned afterwards.
The first of these was always incoherent, and the second one was always foolish and has been thoroughly disproven by direct observation. But Darwin's successors continue on autopilot.