Doubting Didymus

I still can not see the problem. Is it just the predesignation of the 'target' that bothers you? Surely a simple disclaimer, similar to dawkins's 'methinks it is like a weasel' analogy. Something like "of course, evolution does not have a predesignated goal to work towards. In evolution, the 'goal' is a fitter organism than the previous organism, and nothing more."

KeithHarwood

I am coming to the conclusion that it is completely untrue. In a very large population most possible mutations will be present. In small populations they will be there sooner or later. The only thing random about it is which particular individuals get them. Evolution is concerned with populations, not individuals.

BTW, I would put the date at which scientists abandoned the idea of random evolution at 1820, when Lamark published his theory of evolution. It wasn't a very good theory, but it did show that there could be a deterministic mechanism that drove evolution. (OTOH, Lamark's theory lasted nearly 40 years in the general scientific community, so it wasn't that bad. And politicians resurrected it in the Soviet Union until the 1960's.)

pz

How can you claim that all possible mutations would be present? If we just pick humans as an example, with a genome size of 3 billion nucleotides, that would mean there are 4 to the 3 billionth power possible arrangements of those bases. That's a pretty big genomic search space, don't you think?
Lamarck's Philosophie Zoologique was published in 1809, but he had first presented his ideas on evolution in 1801. They were not particularly popular or influential -- how could they be, as he was under the shadow of the much more well-regarded Cuvier? By the 1820's, he was broke and losing his eyesight, and would die in poverty and obscurity in 1829.

I don't see how you can claim that he put an end to the idea of "random evolution", since his contemporaries and predecessors did not believe in evolution at all, random or otherwise.

The concepts really have no bearing on whether evolution was random or not. Lamarck clearly did not believe in any random component; however, his idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics was also adopted by Darwin, who did believe in random variation. Lamarckian inheritance has only found favor in the absence of knowledge about genetics. In that sense, I'd say it's a pretty bad idea that is grounded only in ignorance.