Natural Selection, too slow to win...

"This preservation of favorable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection or the Survival of the Fittest."-Origin of the Species, Darwin.

Darwin used the "term" natural selection over 300 times in the origin of the species.

Today evolution is often referred to as neo-Darwinism or the modern synthesis. It proposes that the DNA mutates randomly, causing a more "fit" phenotype or organism. Natural selection "acts" on this form, thereby preserving that mutation in the genes or genotype.

Fisher was one of the fathers of neo-Darwinism which combined the rediscovered field of genetics by Darwin's contemporary Gregory Mendel.

It was one hundred years after Darwin proposed natural selection that Fischer discussed the genetic basis of natural selection. He says:

"The genetical theory of natural selection"

Fisher

1958"

This has had the unfortunate consequence that the theory of Natural Selection itself has scarcely ever, if ever, received separate consideration.

NATURAL Selection is not Evolution.

Ever since the two words have been in everyday use, the theory of Natural Selection has been employed as a convenient abbreviation for the theory of Evolution. 

The overwhelming importance of evolution to the biological sciences partly explains why the theory of Natural Selection should have been so entirely identified with its role as an evolutionary agency, as to have suffered neglect as an independent principle worthy of scientific study."

Fisher's conclusion of how natural selection is used for evolution is just as relevant today as most laypersons today still equate natural selection with evolution. 

Yet natural selection was a non-scientific "term" embellished by Darwin 300 times in the OOS without the benefit of Gregory Mendel's work.

The key question even today is whether natural selection is an " independent agency" separate from the organism or does the organism have its own "agency," epigenetics indicates the latter.

When put to mathematical vigor, other scientists discovered that natural selection could not account for the formation of genes or proteins during the four billion years history of the Earth.

"Natural selection and the concept of a protein space"

1970

"SALISBURY has argued that there is an apparent contradiction between two fundamental concepts of biology—the belief that the gene is a unique sequence of nucleotides whose function it is to determine the sequence of amino-acids in a protein and the theory of evolution by natural selection. In brief, he calculated that the number of possible amino-acid sequences is greater by many orders of magnitude than the number of proteins which could have existed on Earth since the origin of life, and hence that functionally effective proteins have a vanishingly small chance of arising by mutation. Natural selection is therefore ineffective because it lacks the essential raw material—favorable mutations."

Ergo natural selection acts much too slow for the formation of new varieties. Some quicker Force must be at play. This quicker force is epigenetics.

Rough estimations of the speed of epigenetic tags versus mutation rates indicate that epigenetics works at least 10,000 times as fast as mutation rates.

Therefore an individual organism has its own "agency" and need not wait hundreds or thousands of generations for mutations to cause change. Natural selection, if it works, is almost entirely ignored by the organism with its epigenetic machinery.