 Second, Creationists like Whitcomb and Morris claim that the central mechanism of modern evolutionary thought, Darwin’s natural selection, is bogus. They argue that it is not a genuine claim about the real world but merely a truism, what philosophers call a tautology – something true by the meaning of the words like ‘bachelors are unmarried.’ In the case of natural selection, the Creationists point out that an alternative name for the mechanism is ‘the survival of the fittest.’ But, they ask, who are the fittest? They reply: Those that survive! Hence, natural selection reduces to the tautology that those that survive are those that survive. Not a real claim of science at all. To which evolutionists respond that this is a sleight of hand, showing ignorance of what is genuinely at stake. Natural selection is truly real, for it talks about some organisms actually surviving and reproducing in life’s struggles and others failing to do so. Some of our would-be ancestors lived and had babies and others did not. There was a differential reproduction. This is certainly not a mere truism. It could be that everyone had the same number of children. It could also be that there is no difference overall between the successful and the unsuccessful. This too is denied by natural selection. To say that something is the fitter or fittest is to say that it has certain characteristics (what biologists call adaptations) that other organisms do not have, and that on average one expects the fitter to succeed. But there is no guarantee that this must be so or that it will always happen. An earthquake could wipe out everyone, fit and unfit.