Ugh, scientific theories change all the time. The theory of evolution is the best theory to explain natural evolution, there is no other better theory or even hypothesis. Maybe Coincube could explain this better to you since you seem to listen to him.
Natural Selection holds that organisms adapt to their environments over time. This adaptation is thought to occur through a process of direct selection, fitness related reproduction, and occasional random search. Natural selection can coherently describe the historical situations leading to relatively small differences between organisms – perhaps up to the level of creating new and related species.
What so very few people realize is that Natural Selection is less a biological theory and more of a metaphysical frameworks for biology. Furthermore this framework is appears to be fundamentally incomplete.
There are several areas where natural selection seems to lack sufficient explanatory power. Most of these revolve around the problem of short-term disadvantage tending to undermine long-term advantage at the ‘Major Transitions’ of evolutionary history – which include sexual reproduction but also the evolution of the simple (prokaryotic) cell, the complex (eukaryotic) cell, multicellular organisms, and social organisms. Each of these transitions requires overcoming the fact that natural selection operates much more powerfully and directly upon the lower, simpler and smaller levels of organization that replicate more rapidly; so that there is a constant pressure and tendency for these lower levels to become parasitic upon higher levels. In sum; natural selection is much more rapidly and powerfully dis-integrative than integrative.
The general problem is therefore that the net effect of natural selection alone would be to break down the major transitions of evolution before they can be established – unless this tendency is overcome by some as-yet-unknown purposive (and indeed cognitive) long-termist, integrating and complexity-increasing tendency.
Neither natural selection, nor indeed artificial selection done by Man, has been observed creating a new genus, nor any taxonomic rank more fundamental such as a new family or phylum. There is no observational or experimental evidence which has emerged since 1859 of natural selection leading to major, qualitative changes in form – nor the originating of a novel form. Nobody has, by selection, changed a cat into a dog, let alone a sea anemone into a mouse (or the opposite); nobody has bred a dinosaur from a bird, nor retraced, by selective breeding, a modern species to its assumed ancestral form.
By all appearances natural selection appears to be a radically too small a metaphysical frame - it is not false but it leaves out too much.
Biology cannot exist without a metaphysical framework – and the current one may not be the best, since it has so many, such serious, failures to its name. This is the foundation for various challenges to the current dominant theory of human development. The critiques are serious and should not be casually dismissed.
For more info on this I recommend this excellent paper by Charlton. I borrowed from it liberally in this post.
Reconceptualizing the Metaphysical Basis of Biologyhttps://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2016/03/reconceptualizing-metaphysical-basis-of.html?m=1''There are several areas where natural selection seems to lack sufficient explanatory power. Most of these revolve around the problem of short-term disadvantage tending to undermine long-term advantage at the ‘Major Transitions’ of evolutionary history – which include sexual reproduction but also the evolution of the simple (prokaryotic) cell, the complex (eukaryotic) cell, multicellular organisms, and social organisms. Each of these transitions requires overcoming the fact that natural selection operates much more powerfully and directly upon the lower, simpler and smaller levels of organization that replicate more rapidly; so that there is a constant pressure and tendency for these lower levels to become parasitic upon higher levels. In sum; natural selection is much more rapidly and powerfully dis-integrative than integrative. ''
Assuming he is talking about mutations here I would add that most mutations are actually neutral.
''Nachman and Crowell estimate around 3 deleterious mutations out of 175 per generation in humans (2000). Of those that have significant effect, most are harmful, but the fraction which are beneficial is higher than usually though. An experiment with E. coli found that about 1 in 150 newly arising mutations and 1 in 10 functional mutations are beneficial (Perfeito et al. 2007).
The harmful mutations do not survive long, and the beneficial mutations survive much longer, so when you consider only surviving mutations, most are beneficial.
Beneficial mutations are commonly observed. They are common enough to be problems in the cases of antibiotic resistance in disease-causing organisms and pesticide resistance in agricultural pests (e.g., Newcomb et al. 1997; these are not merely selection of pre-existing variation.) They can be repeatedly observed in laboratory populations (Wichman et al. 1999). Other examples include the following:
Mutations have given bacteria the ability to degrade nylon (Prijambada et al. 1995).
Plant breeders have used mutation breeding to induce mutations and select the beneficial ones (FAO/IAEA 1977).
Certain mutations in humans confer resistance to AIDS (Dean et al. 1996; Sullivan et al. 2001) or to heart disease (Long 1994; Weisgraber et al. 1983).
A mutation in humans makes bones strong (Boyden et al. 2002).
Transposons are common, especially in plants, and help to provide beneficial diversity (Moffat 2000).
In vitro mutation and selection can be used to evolve substantially improved function of RNA molecules, such as a ribozyme (Wright and Joyce 1997).
Whether a mutation is beneficial or not depends on environment. A mutation that helps the organism in one circumstance could harm it in another. When the environment changes, variations that once were counteradaptive suddenly become favored. Since environments are constantly changing, variation helps populations survive, even if some of those variations do not do as well as others. When beneficial mutations occur in a changed environment, they generally sweep through the population rapidly (Elena et al. 1996). ''
But yeah, let's not get too far away from this topic, we could discuss more on the evolution thread.