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PanAtheist wrote
Darwin ended the usefulness of the term "natural" (in its contrast with "artificial", which is how he introduced the phrase!).
As a result of Darwin's discoveries, everything became known to be natural!
And while selection has an effect on which organisms survive and breed (eg. prey selection, and mate selection) it is only one factor among many that brings about differential survival of different genelines.
It is recklessly wrong to use "natural selection".
Who gives a fuck that Darwin used the term!
Freethinkers move on!
To call the whole deal of differential survival "selection" wrongly implies that there is always a selector, and this is insane in the current climate, because it feeds ID.
It's bad, it's stupid, and it's wrong, so it just has to go! :D
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You havent explained why it's recklessly wrong to say that there is NOT a selector, ie natural selection. Here is an abstract from a review article in june 2006 issue of Science. Seems that the folks at MIT and Harvard think its ok to use natural selection.
"Positive natural selection is the force that drives the increase in prevalence of advantageous traits, and it has played a central role in our development as a species. Until recently, the study of natural selection in humans has largely been restricted to comparing individual candidate genes to theoretical expectations. The advent of genome-wide sequence and polymorphism data brings fundamental new tools to the study of natural selection. It is now possible to identify new candidates for selection and to reevaluate previous claims by comparison with empirical distributions of DNA sequence variation across the human genome and among populations. The flood of data and analytical methods, however, raises many new challenges. Here, we review approaches to detect positive natural selection, describe results from recent analyses of genome-wide data, and discuss the prospects and challenges ahead as we expand our understanding of the role of natural selection in shaping the human genome."