evolution - Is natural selection a tautology, and therefore not truly falsifiable?

I've heard the argument from a lot of creationists that all the evidence for natural selection (and by extension, evolution) in general is worthless because natural selection is so flexible that it could cover all the data, no matter what we discovered. In essence, that natural selection is a tautology:

Survival of the fittest. What is 'fit'? What survives.

There are other creationists, however, that admit that natural selection could be falsified. These are split into two groups:

• The ones that say, if you rephrase natural selection as a non-tautology, it becomes obvious that it doesn't work:

Natural selection has been criticized as a tautology. This would be a major problem for evolutionary biology, if true, because tautological statements can't be falsified and, therefore, can't be scientific. There is merit to this critique insofar as the theory of natural selection is indeed generally described in a tautological manner. However, natural selection can be described non-tautologically if we’re careful. Natural selection should be defined as the theory that attempts to predict and retrodict evolutionary change through environmental forces acting upon organisms. However, this re-framing comes at a cost: it reveals, based on our current knowledge of evolutionary forces, the lack of ability to make accurate predictions about expected changes except in the most simple of circumstances.

• And those that say that the falsifying options provided by natural science are impossible to actually use. Here are some of those falsifying options:

1. Charles Darwin himself proposed a rather strong test of evolution: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." [Darwin1859, pg. 175]. This is the basis of claims by various intelligent design writers that various biological structures, such as the vertebrate immune system or the bacterial flagellum, are "irreducibly complex" -- they consist of multiple components that could not develop in the absence of the others. However, these structures have been exhaustively studied in the scientific literature, and scientists have demonstrated entirely plausible evolutionary pathways. See Complexity.


2. Famed biologist J. B. S. Haldane, when asked what evidence could disprove evolution, mentioned "fossil rabbits in the Precambrian era" [Ridley2004, pg. 66]. This is because mammals, according to current scientific analysis, did not emerge until approximately 40 million years ago, whereas the Precambrian era is prior to approximately 570 million years, when only the most primitive organisms existed on earth.


3. Biologists had long conjectured that human chromosome number two was the result of a fusion of two corresponding chromosomes in most other primates. If DNA analysis of these chromosomes had shown that this was not the case, then modern evolutionary theory would indeed be drawn into question. This "fusion hypothesis" was indeed confirmed, rather dramatically, in 1993 (and further in 2005), by the identification of the exact point of fusion. For additional details see DNA.


4. Modern DNA sequencing technology has provided a rigorous test of evolution, far beyond the wildest dreams of Charles Darwin. In particular, comparison of DNA sequences between organisms can be used as a measure of relatedness, and can further be used to actually construct the most likely "family tree" hierarchical relationship between a set of organisms. Such analyses have been done, and the results so far dramatically confirm the family tree that had been earlier constructed solely based on comparisons of body structure and biochemistry. For additional details see DNA.

Is there any way to save natural selection? To do so, we need to:

• Prove it can be explained non-tautologically


• Prove that it does make useful predictions


• Give falsifying experiments that are reproducable and actually possible.

Answer

I think @Remi.b's answer is great and really the only way to answer your questions is with a comprehensive introduction to evolution. However, I wanted to address the tautology issue more directly.

First, the "survival of the fittest" seems like a tautology with "natural selection" because it is not a description of how natural selection works, rather, it is a phrase meant as a synonym for natural selection, to help describe the result to someone unfamiliar with the phrase.

Let me use an analogy: it would be like if you were a very new learner of English, and I told you "Joe's truck has more mass than an elephant!"

If you aren't really familiar with the term "mass" in English, this phrase could be confusing. So I explain instead that "Joe's truck is heavier than an elephant." If you know the word "heavy" this is easier to understand.

However, there is a tautology there! the car is actually heavier because it has more mass, but that does not make either phrase untrue or untestable: it's just another way of saying the same thing within a context (i.e., those statements are the same if they are exposed to the same gravity).

The testable hypothesis that natural selection makes is that, given 2 things: 1) a population where individuals have traits that give them different chances of survival, and 2) some way for offspring to inherit traits from their parent(s), then the population over time will consist of individuals who are more likely to possess the traits that gave a high chance of survival.

Following this, should the environment change in some way such that a different trait is now beneficial, that trait will increase in prevalence.

There are way too many experiments to summarize here that show 1), 2), and a combination of 1) and 2), as well as experiments that show that indeed, when you have 1) and 2) you get natural selection.