Hi everyone,
Here is an article about 'Natural Selection' being a metaphor. It is not from a science journal....but is an interesting piece all the same and gives some interesting insights into the way Darwin thought.
https://nautil.us/blog/why-natural-selection-became-darwins-fittest-metaphor************
Natural selection, his best-known metaphor, is still a fixture of evolutionary biology. Though it’s not always recognized as a metaphor today, that’s exactly what it was to Darwin and his contemporaries. After all, evolution was a foreign and unwieldy concept. So Darwin set out to make it accessible by comparing it to a method employed in farmyards around the world.
Much like the pigeon breeder, Darwin suggested, nature selects traits. If a certain pattern of plumage aids survival, the trait will spread as though nature were playing favorites. By choosing some traits and rejecting others over the course of many generations, nature coaxes new species into being. Of course, nature doesn’t really select anything. It doesn’t have agency of its own. But Darwin suspected the suggestion of agency would be valuable. Thus, “natural selection” was born.
According to Darwin biographer Janet Browne, Darwin often seemed to imagine nature as an “all-seeing farmer in the sky,” a benevolent overseer that selects, scrutinizes, and rejects. As Wallace saw it, the problem with this rosy view is that, strictly speaking, it’s wrong. There is no nice, celestial farmer—just a struggle for existence, with winners and losers.
Over the objections of Wallace and others, Darwin clung to “natural selection”
Perhaps he sensed the power of his “all-seeing farmer” and, in doing so, intuited something deep about human psychology. People are deeply familiar with the logic of purposeful design, and research has shown that they like to view the world through this lens. When faced with hard-to-explain phenomena, they invoke higher powers or hidden plans—concepts like God, fate, and karma all speak to this impulse. The idea of nature as a selecting agency plays to our biases to brilliant effect.
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Very nicely put IMO.
Cheers.
Sriram
