I don't know, go away for a couple of days and the whole thread goes doolally.

Steve Shaw

You are talking in terms of goals

I most certainly am not.

and I have comprehensively dismissed this already more than once.

Quite right too

The cause and the resultant change are blind to each other. Not difficult.

So what is the point in insisting on this cause?

Natural selection is not a determining force: it is blind, without goals. On one island the mutation may be beneficial, on another the self-same mutation may be useless. Natural selection does not work directly on genes, but on favourable (or not) expressed attributes according to the prevailing environmental circumstances.

All true but irrelevant to the point I am taking issue with. Natural selection comes in after the mutation occurs and works on that. Actually, it does most of its work on the reshuffled genes resulting from meiosis.

Read your Darwin.

I have studied biology, genetics and evolution at unversity level. I have read my Darwin. He had nothing to say about mutations arising from the miscopying of DNA because it wasn't discovered till the following century.

The sequence is a result of causes. Absolutely not random.

I have never come across this suggestion before in all my studies. Please back it up with some references or examples or something.

Earlier you said -

If you want to demonstrate that any such miscopying is random you're going to have to show that there was no cause.

No I'm not, anymore than I have to demonstrate that there isn't a teapot in orbit round the Sun between Earth and Mars. You're making the claim. The ball's in your court.