Thank you for the reply, Alec; I understand that I am most probably wrong in my assertion.
If by your “assertion”, you mean your view that novel alleles come about in a population by means other than random mutation (and I include recombination in this), then I think you *are *wrong.
Because it seems that,for the proper mutation to occur, there would have to involve just the correct change in the genetic code, allowing for the wanted positive characteristic to emerge.The probability for this being, in my opinion, extremely small.
But in a real ecological situation there are thousands and thousands of attributes, many of which are in compromised and dynamic equilibrium. Normally there isn’t one mutation in the whole genome that is needed to make a complex organism more fit for its environment. There are many routes for a population to become more fit in an environment.
If the above assumption is correct, an extremely large amount of different random mutants ought to exist alongside, having also the capability of resisting the former destructive environment, while being still very different.
Since the above assumption is *not *correct and it runs counter to well established population genetics, we can dispense with the speculation based on it. An extremely large number of random mutations do exist side by side - both you, I and every human alive on earth have on average three mutations in our protein coding genome - that is 18 billion mutations in the world’s human population, just in the protein coding genome alone. The vast majority of these mutations are neutral, some are mildly deleterious, and a few are beneficial (the seriously deleterious ones are rapidly weeded out by Natural Selection and might not even have resulted in viable individuals). Evolution works slowly in populations - evolutionary biology dispensed with the hopeful monster idea, that you seem to be suggesting, a long time ago.
I have read a bit on Quantum evolution, for example, which seems to suggests mutations being influenced, if not caused by the environment itself. It seems reasonable for me to assume the eye to have evolved because light first had to exist
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Indeed so - random mutations does not mean that mutations are uncaused. What it means is that they occur without reference to the effect they will have. No-one, not even Cairns, has demonstrated a case in which beneficial mutations occur preferentially.See below.
Have you heard of John Cairns’ experiment with bacteria being deficient in their ability to utilise the milk sugar lactose?
Of course - Barry Hall is the guy who started this work:
B G Hall, Genetics, Vol 120, 887-897
B G Hall, Genetics, Vol 126, 5-16
B G Hall, Journal of Bacteriology, February 1999, p. 1149-1155
John Cairns built on this:
J Cairns, Genetics, Vol. 148, 1433-1440
J Cairns. and P. L. Foster, 1991 Genetics
128:695-701
J Cairns et al, Nature
335:142-145
So did others:
Foster and Rosche, Genetics, Vol. 152, 15-30, May 1999
B A Bridges. Nature
387:557-558
I have another 25 references to this work - do you want them? The point is that no-one has been able to demonstrate that the higher mutation rate that arises in starving bacteria is directed to the specific beneficial genomic sites - it seems that the mutational rate across the genome is increased and the beneficial mutations occur as expected from an analysis of the population size and the mutation rate. Patricia Foster’s paper here explains this:
P L Foster, Annual Review of Genetics Vol. 33: 57-88
More recently we have:
Roth et al, Annual Review of Microbiology 60:477-501 (2006)
I assume it’s when the RNA is being replicated, some errors can occur in which the new strand is somewhat different than the original code. However, are we certain that such errors are unintentional or whether some other elements are involved allowing for the change to be made, which in turn would allow for an evolutionary process to occur, making the process of evolution an intelligent design?
It’s DNA that’s replicated from generation to generation not RNA. Errors in replication do lead to mutations, which, as far as we can tell are random in the biologist’s sense: ie they are random with respect to the phenotypic change they cause. (although the rate of mutation is not uniform across the genome and there is strong evidence that the rate has evolved to be higher at sites where mutation is more likely to be beneficial). None of this involves intelligence at all.
Alec
evolutionpages.com/Schoenborn_critique.htm
I’m sure Ed doesn’t think he is God. I don’t agree with his point of view but I sure wouldn’t deny him the right to express himself. He is a human being just like the rest of us. He isn’t crippled, only in need of being nudged toward the right path. 
We’ve been down this road before with Ed. 
One of the brightest of the bunch. Where is PHIL? !!!
A genius with a flare for reality always brings out the best of my personality.