I've long wondered why Darwinians place so much confidence in the ability of random mutation and natural selection to evolve the amazing panoply of living things. It always seemed to me that the conviction that an advantageous mutation - i.e. a mutation which conferred a slight advantage in the struggle for survival and which is granted by Darwinians to be relatively rare - would very likely be lost as soon as it appeared due simply to random events like the death of the organism because of accident, predation, etc.
A mutation that allowed an organism, for instance, to more effectively smell food might be lost simply because the organism perishes at the hands of a natural predator. In other words, having an advantage of one kind only makes survival of that organism very slightly more likely, and if the organism doesn't make it then the mutation is lost until it arises again in some future generation.
I've never seen much written about this problem, but Salvador Cordova has a fascinating discussion of it at Uncommon Descent. He talks about it in terms of what's called the Gambler's Ruin, the topic of a book written in the sixties by a mathematical genius at MIT named Edward O. Thorp. Thorp's book explained how one can beat the Las Vegas casinos, and the movie 21 is based on his work.
Cordova explains its relevance to Darwinian evolution in his article. The upshot is that natural selection is scarcely more likely to preserve a beneficial mutation than is random chance:
Darwin was absolutely wrong to suggest that the emergence of a novel trait will be preserved in most cases. It will not! Except for extreme selection pressures (like antibiotic resistance, pesticide resistance, anti-malaria drug resistance), selection fails to make much of an impact.
What this all means is that Darwin's great contribution to evolutionary biology, the theory of natural selection, is just wrong, or at least it's wrong if it's taken to be an unguided process. If evolution occurred at all it was not, nor could have been, a completely materialistic, mechanistic process.
Check out the entire post if this is a topic that interests you.
RLC
