Neo-Darwinists have long assumed that biological evolution works something like matching one number in Powerball. In their view, natural selection acts to reward or preserve small but relatively probable changes in gene sequences—like winning the small but more likely $4 prize in Powerball over and over again. They assume the mutation and selection mechanism doesn’t depend on winning extremely unlikely “prizes” (like the whole Powerball jackpot) all at once. But what if, to produce a functional advantage at the genetic level, the mutation and selection mechanism had to generate the biological
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