I wrote a response this response to your thread which has since been closed.
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Many don't know that Mivart's full argument against the evolution evolved into the greatest challenge to Darwin's Origin of Species (London, 1859-1872), requiring Darwin to revise his book five times. Why not? Again, just as for Jefferson's choice of natural rights, U.S. public schools don't permit teaching about Mivart's debate with Darwin, because its theistic elements conflict with the public-school system's labeling of all 'theories of purpose,' or teleological theories, as religious propaganda. Many teleological theories, such as aesthetic-based selection, don't even require any belief in God, but nonetheless, the public schools still don't allow teaching of ANY teleological theories.

Intead they have vastly expanded teaching on 'The Theory of Evolution into a complete and unfalsifiable 'explanation' for all life, even while still having some non-theistic issues that Mivart originally debated with Darwin in 1871. I don't have anything further to say on the USA's ethics of that ruling in what it teaches, but I do have some substantive things to say about Mivart's claim that natural selection is only a partial explanation.

Saint Mivart's 1871 objection was to a Darwinian postulation which is now referred to as a gradualist subtheory. It's summarized as '5% of a wing cannot fly.' Gradualism does have viable applications, but is still not thought to have caused wing development. The same argument against the gradual development of dinosaur wings still applies to many current evolutionary explanations.

Let's say a dinosaur DID have some developing stub of a wing that eventually was long enough to glide. It had to find mates to make bigger useless bumps, for thousands of generations, during which the bump was a competitive detriment, consuming unnecessary energy. But dinosaurs would have had to select for larger useless bumps during mating for this part of the theory to work, as variations would otherwise be subsumed into the gene pool. They are certainly not selecting the fittest mate.

How much can we even imagine what is the logical process occurring in the dinosaurs' brains during a mating ritual? "Hey what a sexy useless bump, let's make bigger ones"? lol. Actually, while Darwinists would object to how I phrased it, they still often use a 'less anthropomorphic phrasing' to describe current gradualist explanations.

But however you phrase it, it's not a scientific explanation. It's only an unprovable conjecture as to what animals are 'thinking' during the myriad of mating rituals on this planet (such as in David Attenborough's nature documentaries of males performing bizarre and antics to lure a female).

Darwinists tell me many so-called scientific 'explanations,' but they are not experimentally verifiable (and therefore not hard science), often while sneering at alternatives to their views that evolution is purely based on environmental selection of the most advantageous genetic characteristics, jump started by random mutations in DNA pairs by the sun's gamma-ray radiation. Buth the allegation that all DNA pair alterations are 'random,' and the supposition that animals actually select the 'fittest' mates are only presuppositions. They cannot claim that God does not play dice, that animals also have no sense of beauty, or that there could be some other explanation of what animals find sexy. So a scientist might want to assert 'an animal's sense of beauty is the result of natural selection too,' but WHAT'S THE POINT, lol, it doesn't change the model's power of prediction, and therefore an unnecessary explanation.

Moreover, annexations of the natural selection theory, to 'explain away' deviations from its predictions, include:
* Gene pairing
* Soft selection
* and best of all, 'unknown selection force.'
The natural-selection model provides some excellent predictive powers, especially for microbiology. But the annexation of 'explanations' to turn the theory into a complete rationalization of all observable life make it both unprovable and unfalsifiable, and therefore, a believed opinion, rather than a factual explanation. To hold the theory of evolution is more than a partial explanation pushes it across the line from empirical knowledge into religion.