Yes, we are going to replace natural selection in multiple ways. 1. by editing our genes, 2. by replacing our biology with technology and 3. (what we have done already for some millennia now) by modifying our behaviour through culture and education.
We also change our environment, which has an indirect influence on the selection.
But you can't deduce from the future to the past.
Touche. Nice, concise, and accurate summary.
Nevertheless, the idea that you can deduce from the future to the past has been the under-girding of Judeo/Christian thought from the beginning. The entire apparatus of Judeo/Christian theology both posits, and has posited for thousands of years, the idea that: "
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion" (Einstein). "
Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58).
The idea isn't merely to point out that Judeo/Christian thought often makes points in a mythological sense (Jesus existed before Abraham even though chronologically that seems impossible) that seem prescient if they in fact predicted modern scientific concepts a long time ago. The fact is that not only is every single blind-spot in modern science made transparently clear in Judeo/Christian thought (properly exegeted from scripture and transformed from mythological conceptualization) but as many eminent historians of science point out, there appears to be presuppositions in Judeo/Christian thought without which modern science, say quantum physics, and such, are unthinkable. "
How does quantum mechanics today differ from what Bishop George Berkeley told us two centuries ago, "Esse est percipi", to be is to be perceived" (John Wheeler,
At Home in the Universe, p. 120).
As Karl Popper and other's note, Bishop Berkely stated the basics of quantum physics hundreds of years ago, but in a theological context, such that theological concepts propounded by men like him and Kant are, and Popper says this, the very impetus for the development of quantum physics. When materialistic scientists set out to prove, through experimentation, that Berkeley and Kant's belief that things don't exist when they're not being perceived, simply can't be true, they instead came to realize how true and prescient Berkeley and Kant's theological speculation turns out to be:
Let me put it this way. We know for a fact that long before Kant started to philosophize he was dedicated, simply as a Christian, to the belief that the empirical world of time and space and material objects, within which everything is evanescent and everything perishes, is something that exists only for us mortals in our present life; that "outside" this world there is another, so to say infinitely more "important', realm of existence which is timeless and spaceless, and in which the beings are not material objects. Now it is as if he then said to himself: "How can these things be so? What can be the nature of time and space and material objects if they obtain only in the world of human beings? Could it be, given that they characterize only the world of experience and nothing else, that they are characteristics, or preconditions, of experience, and nothing else?" In other words, Kant's philosophy is a fully worked out analysis of what needs to be the case for what he believed already to be true.
Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, p. 249, 250.
Every single blind-spot in materialism and atheism is hiding truths and facts from the Neo-Darwinist and atheists, truths, facts, and scientific-realities that Jews and Christians have known, and been teaching, literally, for thousands of years. Take the intro Richard Dawkins gives to Jeff Hawkins' recent book:
It is the glory of the human cerebral cortex that it -----unique among all animals and unprecedented in all geological time ---has the power to defy the dictates of the selfish genes. We can enjoy sex without procreation. We can devote our lives to philosophy, mathematics, poetry, astrophysics, music, geology, or the warmth of human love, in defiance of the old [reptile] brain's genetic urging that these are a waste of time ---time that "should" be spent fighting rivals and pursuing multiple sexual partners: "As I see it, we have a profound choice to make. It is a choice between favoring the old brain or favoring the new brain. More specifically, do we want our future to be driven by the processes that got us here, namely, natural selection, competition, and the drive of the selfish genes? Or, do we want our future to be driven by intelligence and its desire to understand the world?"
Richard Dawkins, introducing Jeff Hawkins, One Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence (bracket mine, based on earlier comment in intro. Last quotation is Dawkins quoting Hawkins).
Anyone who's been to Sunday School once or twice in their lifetime is aware that what Richard Dawkins and Jeff Hawkins are hocking above, as though it's new and profound, has been taught in churches and synagogues for thousands of years (put off the flesh and focus on moral truth, love for God and one's fellow man), thus proving the power of Ludwik Fleck's insight concerning how thought-collectives deal (or don't) with concepts their worldview can't digest:
(1) A contradiction to the system appears unthinkable. (2) What does not fit into the system remains unseen; (3) alternatively, if it is noticed, either it is kept secret, or (4) laborious efforts are made to explain an exception in terms that do not contradict the system. (5) Despite the legitimate claims of contradictory views, one tends to see, describe, or even illustrate those circumstances which corroborate current views and thereby give them substance.
Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (p. 27). Kindle Edition.
It's unthinkable to the Neo-Darwinist that human thought transcends the material arrow of time. It's unthinkable that the human mind is an immaterial soul with an existence as real, more real, than any material thing. And yet the fact that Jews and Christians have believed and taught these concepts is the very impetus for their existence in modern science in concepts like those found in the most modern scientific thought that's ever existed, quantum physics.
When Aspect and his team performed the experiment and tallied the results they discovered that the angles of polarization were indeed correlated in a way that indicated the photons were instantaneously connected with one another, and this was a mind-boggling finding. It meant that some of our most cherished and accepted notions about reality are in error. . . However, what was all the more astounding was that the Aspect experiment - an experiment which most assuredly changed our understanding of reality as much as the revelations of Copernicus or Darwin - went almost completely unnoticed by the mass media.
Michael Talbot, Mysticism and the New Physics, p. 143.
Alain Aspect used sound science to show that communication can occur at speeds faster than the speed of light. As Talbot notes, the mass media yawned. For good reason. Faster than light communication implies space, time, and the traversing of both, are not what they appear. The fact that scientific-materialists barely blinked when the Aspect experiment destroyed the commonsense view of the passage through, and of, time and space, justifies Ludwik Fleck's first four points.
John
