Evolution only studies, describes and theorizes on the processes of biological change that occurs, by natural phenomenon. It's not technically correct to interject that it serves anything other than to knowledge and understanding of the process itself. The survival of the fittest is only an outcome of the natural process that is driven by fixed and inviolable natural laws.
""Luck" explicitly stands in the place of "Mind"
There is no mind involved in evolution. Mind can and has arisen from an evolutionary process, but does not partake in the process itself. At least not until recently. There are fixed materials and fixed laws, that can not be broken, that govern their interaction. The idea of randomness only refers to whether, or not some condition, or other material is present at the time an interaction would occur. The actual distribution that governs the the presence of those conditions, or materials, is not always random though, and can follow any pattern, period or distribution. There is also the fact that randomness is involved in any isolated interaction, but that is trivial and does not cause any net change.
It is a fact that some folks deliberately pervert scientific fields such as biology and it's specialty of evolution with irrelevant and false claims and reductions like Ridley has done here. It's become widespread and tolerated. I've even encountered opinions on income distributions, health care and government policy objectives in the middle of an advanced electrochem text! It doesn't belong there. There is no fundamental and universal purpose in either the field of electrochemistry, or the field of biology, other than to gain knowledge of a finite set of pertinent observables regarding electrochem, or life. All other purposes are external to that and involve choice.
All of biology is and should be restricted to the mechanical. That is, to the mechanics of what is. Not to the esthetics, or purpose of life. To so just corrupts it into something else, that will always contain falsehoods, contradictions that violate the fundamental and universal purpose of it, which is to gain knowlege regarding the mechanics of life.
The only statements that biology can make about mind regards it's mechanics and that it processes inputs and makes decisions. The content, color and form of those are not the proper study for biology. Biology can cover the mechanics of the mind, but can say nothing about the forces that drive it, except for autonomic drives. They are fixed like gravity. Ridely is claiming in his book, that the mind of man is autonomic. That's not so. The mind of man can scientifically be shown to be composed of consciousness with the capacity for reason, free will, and emotion. None of these are autonomic, because anyone can come up with an example that discloses to the casual observer that there is no fixed autonomic response to any paticular stimuli to these features of consciousness. The response depends on how the individual sets up the machine, not how the machine sets up the individual. That's what Ridley is trying to con folks into believing-That the machine sets up the individual.
What biology says is that the machine has the capacity for consciousness, emotion and free will. It can only, and must to be truthful, declare that free will is a natural law. Biology can address proper working order and provide info for repair, but only for the machine, not it's capacities. The capacities are to be covered by other fields of study.
In other light, or the foundation for his con, Ridley makes the mistake that the mind is an extention of the body. It's not, the body is an extension of the mind. The most prevalent reason that people make this invalid claim of fundamental extension is to eventually deny the sovereignty of will, from it's rightful owner.
Were this so, the so-called crevo debates here on FR would not exist. As it is, biology textbooks still make much of abiogenesis and Discovery Channel still promotes Evolution with its Apeman glorifications. So Evolutionist disclaimers notwithstanding (that itself is a fairly recent phenomenon), promoters of Evolution do indeed trod on forbidden philosophical territory, and with a vengeance, at least judged by the 20th Century. This alone is a "mortal sin" but it gets worse. Evolution does not even show that one species transforms into another or explain the mechanics of such transformation, and it does not therefore even qualify as science. "Mutation" and "chance" are suppositions, not explanations, and neither is supported by the evidence. From day one, Evolution has been an exercise in rhetoric only, as laid out in exquisite detail by Gertrude Himmerfarb in Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (written in 1959 but still avialable at Amazon.com in paperback).
The debate should have ended. So the relevant question to me is: "Why has Darwinism not long since gone the way of the Dodo?" And the answer that constantly springs to my mind is that Darwinism still represents the last best hope for a science-based counterforce to Christianity. This "answer" is supported by the constant Creationist-bashing committed by the Evolutionists on the "crevo" threads.
Until biology struggles into the 20th Century by abandoning Materialism and Reductionism, Darwinism will require continued refutation. The physicists have stepped back (to say the least!) from these modes of thought. Will the biologists begin to listen to the physicists?