Comment by DonHopkins

Saying "what survives, survives" may bother Creationists, the Discovery Institute, and Intelligent Design pushers, but not actual scientists who don't have an ideological agenda to discredit evolution as revenge because it discredits their religious dogma.

Saying "what survives, survives" is like saying physics explains motion as "things that move, move." That’s not what the theory actually claims; it’s a caricature.

Evolutionary theory explains mechanisms, not slogans. "Fitness" is not the explanation, it’s a measurable consequence of those mechanisms.

If you want teleology or ultimate purpose, science won’t give you that, so take some shrooms and ask the machine elves. But evolution absolutely explains how structured complexity accumulates without foresight, and it does so with predictive, testable models.