Quote Originally Posted by zyna View Post
I couldn't agree more with you. Many people think they've understood the theory of evolution, because essentially it's pretty simple, but somehow they don't seem to understand it's consequences. And most people forget one important factor in evolution: not mutation or selection, but chance. i.e. an earthquake or a volcanic eruption don't ask about adaptation, they simply kill everything within their reach. And the individuals that survive, mostly by pure chance, will form the new population, in which the genes can be distributed totally different compared to the original population. And those genes will be passed on to the next generation.
That's actually a really bad way of putting it - it's not by pure chance.

Natural selection doesn't work on chance. It works on the basis of survival of the fittest. Words like 'random' and 'chance' really shouldn't be used in conjunction with an explanation of natural selection because natural selection is anything but random, it's 'guided' towards the strong surviving and the weak dying. The only random part about any of it is the mutation in the genes to create variation.