What is the Cause of Evolution?

A friend sent me a copy of a review (apparently from the February 2009 issue of a publication called Choice) of a book written by Susan Jacoby, entitled The age of American unreason. The reviewer wrote:

But [the book] ... offers a sharply argued defense of reason, logic, science, ... If the anti-evolution fervor of religious fundamentalism is the US's most glaring example of irrationalism, ...

Strictly speaking, neither anti-evolution fervor nor anti-anti-evolution fervor are in the scientific tradition, which never quite believes any theory. Personally, I find the idea of progressive evolution to be in conflict with the idea of natural selection, and the latter seems more reasonable to me than the former. Namely, the idea that life was destined to progress from simple organisms to ever more complex organisms, culminating in homo intelligenticus, might appeal to some religious and social thinkers, but it seems irrational in the absence of an observed cause of this particular effect.

Natural selection, as I understand it, is the idea that different kinds of organisms may happen to be better equipped to cope with hostile new environments than other kinds of organisms. Those that are sufficiently well equipped will survive, while those that are not so well equipped will not survive. There is no guarantee that any organism will be sufficiently well equipped to survive. It may be, I might add, that those organisms that can cope marginally in a hostile new environment might eventually experience mutations that would permit them to cope more (or less) favorably.

These are mere ideas that I certainly have never tested or even investigated because I have no emotional motive to do so. Fortunately, there and countless anti-evolutionists and perhaps a few anti-natural selectionists who are motivated to find fatal flaws in the theories. Bravo!

Eugene Paul