Ken Ham

Ken Ham
NOTES: The quote below from AIG was removed by them without explanation. They don't say anything about the tautology argument. If they have changed their view on this issue, they must clearly state why.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-answers/topic/arguments-we-dont-use

“Natural selection is a tautology.”

Natural selection is in one sense a tautology. Who are the fittest? Those who survive and leave the most offspring. Who survive and leave the most offspring? The fittest. But a lot of this is semantic wordplay, and depends on how the matter is defined, and for what purpose the definition is raised. There are many areas of life in which circularity and truth go hand in hand. For example, what is electric charge? That quality of matter on which an electric field acts. What is an electric field? A region in space that exerts a force on electric charge. But no one would claim that the theory of electricity is thereby invalid and can’t explain how motors work; it is only that circularity cannot be used as independent proof of something. To harp on the issue of tautology can become misleading, if the impression is given that something tautological therefore doesn’t happen. Of course the environment can “select,” just as human breeders select. But demonstrating this doesn’t mean that fish could turn into philosophers by this means. The real issue is the nature of the variation, the information problem. Arguments about tautology distract attention from one of the real weaknesses of neo-Darwinism—the source of the new information required. Given an appropriate source of variation (for example, an abundance of created genetic information with the capacity for Mendelian recombination), replicating populations of organisms would be expected to be capable of some adaptation to a given environment, and this has been demonstrated amply in practice.