Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
Any given evolutionary change's purpose is driven by the selection that drove it. Cheetahs run fast because their prey runs fast. Prey runs fast because cheetahs run fast, it's a biological arms race.
Evolution isn't random because natural selection is the opposite of random. Genetic mutations are random, and those are the seeds which natural selection uses (without changes to the genome there would be nothing for natural selection to work with), but natural selection is definitely not random.
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It's not random in a mathematic sense. It makes sense and it works quite beautifully.
I meant random that it doesn't have a driving purpose in the sense that religion does. A pure Neo-Darwinian worldview is way too reductionist to take into account the substance of everyday human life.