OK, one more round....
I said: "1. You made no distinction between: 1) the net effect of
"evolution" as an ensemble of diverse processes and events, and 2) the
outcome of individual events within an evolutionary context."
You replied: "Help me out here. How am I supposed to do that? If the
individual events within the evolutionary context are, to quote the author
of the text "[do] not move toward a more perfect state nor even toward
greater complexity", then how can one maintain that the enterprise does?"
OK, I'll try. We need to distinguish more carefully between "one particular
individual event" and "the entire set of all relevant individual events."
As an illustrative example, take the phenomenon of the diffusion of gas X
into a space originally occupied by gas Y. The individual molecular
motions of X are random. One particular individual X molecular motion may
momentarily be in one direction, but the net effect of the set of all X
molecular motions may well be a diffusion of X in the opposite direction.
Thus it may well be the case that some, but not all, particular events and
process relevant to evolution fail to move "toward a more perfect state nor
even toward greater complexity." Nonetheless, the net effect of the set of
all relevant events and processes could still be in the direction of, say,
increasing complexity.
If the textbook author failed to make this distinction evident, then he/she
is open to criticism. However, anyone who repeats that failure is equally
open to criticism, right?
Enough on this.
Howard Van Till