How is Natural selection a mechanism?

That's true. If you don't have children, then you are not participating in evolution.If your strength translates into an increased chance to survive and to rear children to child bearing/siring age, then you have a greater chance to propagate your traits. The people/animals/plants that do not survive to bear offspring have zero chance to propagating their genes.Surely that is abundantly clear. That's incorrect. You are ignoring the possibility that you will be a mutant having inheritable characteristics that your parents did not have. Natural selection operates on variation. Selection is only part of the explanation. Obviously.

Except that the statement did not say anything about killing something. It talks about someone who has an enhanced physical phenotype, but still does not have children. Regardless of how fit or superior such a person is, he does not contribute to evolution because his genes cannot propagate.That said, in hindsight, I see that I was wrong. Because said super-man might well prevent some weaker person from getting the girl. So even though he does not propagate his genes, he may be part of the selection process.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

You haven't made any such argument. Your thoughts are private because there is no outward indication of what goes on inside your head. That should not be all that surprising given that your skull is opaque. That condition would be the same whether or not consciousness was an emergent property.Get a better argument.

It is silly to ask the question of need regarding inanimate objects while the purpose for an instinct to survive for animals is a pointless question.These kinds of why questions presuppose a particular type of universe that simply may not exist.

The same thing is true about your brain. It is not accessible to people around you. Again, you haven't made a meaningful argument.

1) Generally we don't have such access.
2) You have not made the case that gaining such access does not provide clues to your mental state. We know that the opposite is the case. It is entirely possible that limitations on exploring the activity of the mind given access to the brain are strictly technological.Get a better argument.

Exactly. Why do creationists forget about the existence of the sun when they pursue their 2nd law of thermodynamics arguments?Maybe the refrigerator example is too esoteric. How do they think babies develop from a small clump of cells? How do they think new borns can grow and develop into small infants just by drinking milk? Just where do skin cells come from?Non-thinking, idiotic, grasping at straws, no logic, grrr.

One might legitimately, ask "where do the eyes end and the brain begin?" The eye does some processing, but it generates electrical signals that the brain interprets. It is the brain that decides who we identify signals from those receptors.Perhaps the distinction is just not meaningful.

You don't see...What you are saying is idiotic. Have you ever seen ice form outside of a refrigerator? Do you know where the energy comes from that drives the weather allowing the creation of snow flakes, sleet, hail and other forms of ice. How about the hot sun you think so little of?If there is energy input into a system, then it is possible to sort things into low entropy arrangements at the expense of gains in entropy in other systems or in other parts of the system. That is the role that the sun plays.More examples of systems in which entropy may decrease. The forming of crystals, the turning of digested food into living human cells. The development of embryos into human beings. The condensation of water vapor into dew or rain.Get a thermodynamics textbook and find out what the second law of thermodynamics really says.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Bingo...It is not just the scientifically untrained Creationists who bungle the 2nd law of thermodynamic. Here is something a PhD holding creationist had to say about the topic:

quote:

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Rensberger is ignorant of the creationist responses to this argument. An energy source is not enough to produce the specified complexity of life. The energy must be directed in some way. The ice cubes of his example would not form if the electrical energy was just wired into liquid water! Instead, we would get lots of heat, and the water breaking up into simpler components, hydrogen and oxygen.

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This is Dr. Safarti making pretty much the same mistake that AndewPD makes when he says that refrigerators are intelligently designed machines that violate the 2nd law. The easy counter argument is pointing at ice forming without a refrigerator or any one of the other easily citable examples already presented in this thread.

Yes. Some idiots did take that social step. Negative selection is not the whole of it. That is part of it, yes. But some new traits are an improvement over the norm, and natural selection favors those. That would be a positive selection. Some traits are neutral in some environments, beneficial in others, and possibly even detrimental in another environment. So selection would not even remove the traits from the entire population, it would just emphasize different traits in different environments. You are telling half of a story. Unless being exclusively gay is an inheritable trait, "weeding" out exclusive gayness via natural selection is not really what the theory of evolution is about, now is it?. That is a further example of how natural selection is being misused in your rant.

You are lying. Dawkins, like Darwin, made observations about what natural selection and evolution produce. I don't see in the quote you posted any endorsement that things ought to be that way. You saw the words robot, blindly, and selfish did you not? Those words do not describe how we should govern our behavior. They instead state what Dawkins believes occurs. You simply lied and then attributed the lie to someone else.

Not restricted to humans. Birds can arrange fallen twigs, leaves, etc into a nest. Beavers can dam up streams. Both are examples of entropy decreases in a part of a system. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.