The driving force for evolution is not natural selection, as is suggested from time to time. Natural selection is a rudder, not a driving force. Natural selection, as its name states, just selects. Natural selection (or its chemical equivalent, kinetic selection) helps steer the replicating population toward higher DKS by the continual elimination of those entities in the population that contribute to a lowering of its DKS. And that is true along the entire evolutionary road, from the population of simple (but unidentified) replicating entities which heralded life’s tentative beginnings, right
...more
