Natural selection is based on the hypothesis that there is a constant struggle for survival among species and those living things that are strongest and best adapted to natural conditions survive that struggle and live to propagate themselves. For example, in a herd of deer, those animals that are naturally able to run fast will escape predators and survive. Naturally, this herd will soon consist of deer that are all able to run quickly.
But note that no matter how long this predator pressure lasts, the deer will never turn into any other species. Weak deer are eliminated and the fittest survive; but no "evolution" of species takes place, because there is no change in the deer's genetic information. No matter how much herds of deer are subjected to natural selection, they will still remain deer.
This example applies to all other species. Deformed or weak individuals in a population, or those unfitted to environmental conditions are eliminated by way of natural selection. But no new species, genetic information or organs will emerge as a result. In other words, living things cannot evolve by way of natural selection.
Darwin admitted as much when he wrote, "Natural selection can do nothing until favourable individual differences or variations occur."69
Natural selection was a natural phenomenon known to biologists before Darwin, but described as a mechanism that enables species to remain stable without being impaired. It was Darwin who first claimed that this process was an evolutionary force and thus constructed his whole theory on that basis. The name he gave his book-The Origin of Species, By Way of Natural Selection-shows that natural selection represented the foundation of Darwin's theory.
Stephen Jay Gould, one of the best-known contemporary evolutionists, says this about Darwinism's grave error:
The essence of Darwinism lies in a single phrase: natural selection is the creative force of evolutionary change. No one denies that selection will play a negative role in eliminating the unfit. Darwinian theories require that it create the fit as well.70
In an article published in American Scientist magazine, the evolutionist C. Loring Brace describes how Darwinism has been refuted by scientific discoveries and states that we cannot regard natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism:
Readers of American Scientist may not realize the extent to which a major part of the field of biology and almost all of paleontology has rejected Darwin's insights concerning organic evolution. Natural selection is dismissed as contributing nothing more than "fine-tuning," and adaptation is largely ignored in practice.71
69.Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, New York: The Modern Library, p. 127.
70.Stephen Jay Gould, "The Return of Hopeful Monsters," Natural History, vol. 86, June/July 1977, pp. 22-30.
71.C. Loring Brace, American Scientist, Vol. 82, September/October 1994, p. 484-486.
