Make sure you're subscribed to Two Issues, etc.

Type Issues, etc. in your podcast provider, hit that subscribe button, and leave us a five-star review.

This will make it easier for other podcast listeners to find issues, etc.

It is accepted as axiomatic by so many in science, the idea of natural selection.

But if you scratch the surface, you realize that what natural selection actually does is simply replace the God of creation with a faceless, nameless God that is, well, never really described in any detail.

But when you hear scientists talk about nature choosing or nature selecting or nature encouraging, they're talking about a God.

They call it nature, but it really is, for all intents and purposes, a God.

Welcome back to Issues, etc. I'm Todd Wilkin.

We're going to talk about natural selection and a better way of understanding how species change over time, adaptive engineering.

Dr. Randy Golusa joins us. He's president of the Institute for Creation Research.

He has an MD from the University of Minnesota and a Master of Public Health from Harvard University, and he's also several books, including made in his image examining the complexities of the human body.

Dr. Golusa, welcome.

Well, thank you very much.

How is the idea of natural selection defined?

Well, you can actually get a dictionary definition, which is pretty standard of what we learn in school, where it would define natural selection as a process, where organisms with certain traits, which are good at solving a specific environmental problem, will tend to increase in the population over time, because those without the traits would die off in the population.

Therefore, as organisms reproduce, and then they are able to solve different problems, those traits would tend to take over in the population, and supposedly, because there is a competition for resources, those with the best traits would then advance.

The problem is, people who actually use the idea of definition for a living can't decide on many of those factors that I just defined to you, which we would find in a standard textbook definition.

For instance, there is a big debate right now whether death is actually a major component of natural selection, something that has traditionally been in the whole idea of natural selection.

So it sounds like while you can find a bare definition, the devil is in the details because those who actually work with this concept have varying definitions of those components.

Yes, exactly. That's a great way of phrasing it. The devil is in the details. Is there really this constant competition between organisms? Is there really a constant ratcheting of improvement of traits over time?

Those are two details which there's a lot of debate on. As I mentioned earlier, do organisms actually have to die in order for these advantageous traits to pass on, or would it just be a type of differential reproduction? In other words, you leave more offspring and offspring that are able to reproduce themselves.

So the devil really is in the details and when you actually talk to biologists who are using this for a living, they will state very, very plainly that nobody has actually been able to come up with an unequivocal definition of natural selection.

...