Secondly Bethell argues against the propensity of Darwin and his contemporaries to summarily compare natural processes with the artificial selection used by breeders. This, according to the author, appears to be the result of a cultural paradigm of "industrial capitalism," which saw all change as inherently progressive. Gould opens his first argument by admitting that Bethell's theory correlate well with current technical writings on natural selection. Indeed, many of these focus on the numbers of survivors rather than their differentiation. Gould however continues to state that nature is hardly submissive to computer manipulation, and that while the superiority of a certain animal may be expressed as differential survival, it is not defined by it. Survival is then a result of fitness rather than its Gould's response to Bethell's first corollary then is that nature is indeed a creative force, and that factors of nature rather than computer-generated data on its own should be taken into account when considering this. It is indeed observable that nature allows its creatures to change and adapt according to environment.

This is also the basis of Gould's response to Bethell's second corollary: Darwin's comparison of the artificially altered environments used in breeding can be correlated with the changing environment in nature itself, justifying Darwin's view. The ability of animals to adapt to these environments then determines their survival, and also shows the creative force of nature.