(1) There is a reproduction process in which characteristics are inherited (2) Things with X characteristics in Y environment die/live etc.
This merely says that the surviving characteristics will move towards optimal in an unspecified range, assuming there are no other significant influences.
It is not explained how exactly the things with less likely characteristics have appeared in the first place. Is there perhaps another process that causes non-optimality? How could you know the process is not actually stronger than the process of natural selection?
It is also not obvious that this process of improvement can cross boundaries between species. You proved that a healthy dog is more likely to survive than a sick dog. You didn't prove that the super-healthy dog will evolve to a lion or an eagle.
So this naive observation is actually not in contradiction with creationism. (Of course only after the creationism is updated to include it. But hey, scientists change their opinions, too.)
To move further, we need to know that the information which encodes the organism can change randomly (mutation), and that all species use the very same mechanism, so it is possible in theory to modify the information step by step starting with dog and ending with an eagle, in each step getting organisms which would be optimized for some environment. We need some kind of "universal DNA" hypothesis, even if we don't know the exact formula for the DNA. And it's not really obvious that dogs and eagles and fish and trees are all encoded in the same way.
On the other hand, once we have a microscope, the "universal DNA" hypothesis becomes rather simple to prove, because it is enough to explore what we have here and now.
I agree that understanding the extent to which natural selection generated things is easier nowadays than it was previously.
So this naive observation is actually not in contradiction with creationism.
I'm not concerned here with logical disproofs of creationism, moreso with something like arguing that time spent {worrying that evolution by natural selection is significantly overrated} is probably misallocated, or arguing that people are privileging the question of 'Is evolution by natural selection a good explanation?' (I'm not entirely sure what my mot...
I've been thinking recently that I believe in the Theory of Evolution on about the same level as in the Theory of Plate Tectonics. I have grown up being taught that both are true, and I am capable of doing research in either field, or at least reading the literature to examine them for myself. I have not done so in either case, to any reasonable extent.
I am not swayed by the fact that some people consider the former (and not so much the latter) to be controversial, primarily because those people aren't scientists. I tend to be self-congratulatory about this fact, but then I think that I am essentially not interested in examining the evidence, but I am essentially taking it on faith (which the creationists are quick to point out). I think I have good Bayesian reasons to take science on faith (rather than, say, mythology that is being offered in its stead), but do I therefore have good reasons to accept a particular well-established scientific theory on faith, or is it incumbent upon me to examine it, if I think its conclusions are important to my life?
In other words, is it epistemologically wrong to rely on an authority that has produced a number of correct statements (that I could and did verify) to be more or less correct in the future? If I think of this problem as a sort of belief network, with a parent node that has causal connections to hundreds of children, I think such a reliance is reasonable, once you establish that the authority is indeed accurate. On the other hand, appeal to authority is probably the most famous fallacy there is.
Any thoughts? If Eliezer or other people have written on this exact topic, a reference would be appreciated.