ABSTRACT
In the conventional wisdom of neo-Darwinism it is the impersonal process of natural selection that provides the creative, ordering mechanism. It is natural selection that drives the products of chance to the remarkable heights of complexity and sophistication so clearly evident in the living world. Natural selection embodies an idea that is both unnatural and alien to the spirit of modern, scientific materialism. Darwin believed he had discovered in natural selection the very mechanism that would explain what previously had required some form of vitalism. Clearly, with the 'prolife' force driving the natural world, 'tinkering' in the Darwinian sense of variations being continuously exploited by the sieving action of unnatural, life-promoting selection, becomes a legitimate mechanism for organic improvement, that is, evolution. Many neo-Darwinists have admitted to the semantic problems raised in the use of the term 'natural selection'. There is no particular selective force in nature, nor a definite selecting agent.
