I once had to wrest our pet ferret from the jaws of a marten (that one looked more squarish as I recall).

I smell a crackpot.

It absolutely aids Ray Comfort to move your dialog from “science” to isms.

Yes… But again, Matthew [it's confusing to refer to him as "Jerry", speaking of terms ] is using a correct scientific term, albeit I do have problems with it. This is on the order of using “theory”, which also helps creationists.

Changing terms will not help, because the creationists will, and have, adopted new terminology and thwarted it as they see fit. We have to make a stand. (But again, this is not the place to make it.)

defeat means defeating her philosophy

When your strategy is doomed: philosophies can’t be defeated (unless they happen to be constructed inconsistent), that is their modern purpose.

I would suggest a practical defeat, like marginalizing crackpots (again). Ways to do that can be based on that their beliefs (philosophies) are ludicrous, because they go up against facts, because science works while philosophy doesn’t (outside its own terms of navel gazing), and so on and so forth.

Otherwise we have wasted not only the Enlightenment but also society.

You know, I might have saved us some trouble if I had made a better distinction between “selection” in statistical selection and natural selection in the first place…

I think – even if a uniform selection is a statistical process, and also happens in nature. It is, I believe, defined away as it isn’t filtering. It is instead defined as variation in “population size”. But I may be wrong.

WRONG.

Um, no, RIGHT.

This was the general context of “random”, before I started to pare down the meanings. “Random” is also in contexts “Having no definite aim or purpose; not sent or guided in a particular direction; made, done, occurring, etc., without method or conscious choice; haphazard.” [Wikipedia.] “Haphazard” is the exact opposite of selective.

You can certainly select things “at random” …

Sure, I use stochastic processes all the time. Which is why I (tried to) describe just that.

Palin is willfully ignorant and proudly arrogant of that fact and is anti-intellectual. Read the books by Susan Jacoby to understand this phenomenon, particularly “The Age of American Unreason”. Their legion are many.