Randomness in Natural Selection and Species as Islands in a "Vast Sea of Conceivable Arrangements"

Editor's note : Dr. Lnnig is a retired geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Germany.

Stephen Meyer and Richard Dawkins have been engaged in a disagreement on randomness in natural selection. How shall we adjudicate it? First, I wrote in an encyclopedia article several years ago on "The Reproductive Powers of Living Beings and the Survival of the Fittest"1:

Dobzhansky's 1937 work Genetics and the Origin of Species is generally viewed as the crystallization poin...