Talk:Conrad Hal Waddington

Waddington and creationists

Many creationist websites seem to be quoting Waddington that natural selection is a tautology and does not exist. If anyone has the time perhaps you can help try to get to the bottom of this. Waddington was a respected scientist so of course the creationists like it when they quote him and think they have a case against natural selection, but it looks like dishonest quote mining from the creationists from what I can work out so far.

According to this which seems to be promoting Richard Milton:

"Conrad Waddington, a Professor of Biology at Edinburgh University, said, 'Natural selection, which was at first considered as though it were a hypothesis that was in need of experimental or observational confirmation, turns out on closer inspection to be a tautology, a statement of an inevitable although previously unrecognized relation.' He says that the fittest individuals in a population defined as those who leave most offspring, will leave most offspring. That's perhaps a useful way of putting things, but remember what we're looking for here is the engine of evolution. I don't think a tautology of any kind is really advancing our scientific understanding of the world. These are just words. It's just a way in which we look at things and classify what's going on. We're not talking here about something which is fundamentally underlying the biological realm." Link DinoCrisis (talk) 23:50, 11 November 2012 (UTC)