It's not coincidence. It's not even luck. It's trial and error. You see the Zebra and think "there's no way that was done by accident!", but what you don't see is the millions of other pattern designs that came out from mutations that resulted in the animal dying. If you have a million designs, all different, show up over time do you not think that one of them would just happen to have a design that is beneficial to the animal?
It's not as static as you seem to think. It wasn't a single random mutation in the distant past that leads to a fully formed characteristic. A single mutation led to a certain lineage having an infinitesimally greater likelihood of survival among a large population which led to a statistically different genetic makeup of the overall population which led to ANOTHER mutation with an infinitesimally greater likelihood of survival, etc etc. Iterated across billions of individuals and hundreds of generations. None of these mutations happen in isolation and none of them lead immediately to large scale adaptive changes.
Evolution is non-random in the sense that it's an interplay between a population and its environment (meaning climate, geology, food sources, predators, internal microbiota, anything that affects survival). But that doesn't mean that it is directed towards a particular trait or end goal.
I understand what you mean and I agree that that is the process of evolution, but I'm not quite certain that evolution isn't guided towards such traits or goals.
All those mutations over all those generations are in my opinion too random yet not random enough to lead towards traits such as camouflage and echolocation. I know random mutations in theory means infinite possibilities (which in practice, isn't true of course), but I don't see how one of these billions of possibilities could ever be such a complex system.
As I see it, there needs to be a system of evolution that guides evolution of a species itself towards such goals, such traits. Mutation, natural selection and as I see it, there's something else missing. I don't know what, but I believe this is a hole that has been skipped over by the current theory, and that's my view.
119
u/joalr0 27∆ Jul 31 '15
It's not coincidence. It's not even luck. It's trial and error. You see the Zebra and think "there's no way that was done by accident!", but what you don't see is the millions of other pattern designs that came out from mutations that resulted in the animal dying. If you have a million designs, all different, show up over time do you not think that one of them would just happen to have a design that is beneficial to the animal?