I think that "selection as causation" is the central concept invented by Darwin. The details have increased dramatically in number and complexity over the years, but the central insight remains.
Selection as causation -- no problem with that concept! Still, I suspect that only that which is "selectable" is, er, "causable." Perfect randomness appears to be somehow constrained. In a way, it is constraint -- what Aristotle called limit -- that gives things their "shape," or "whatness," for however long that "shape" may persist. "Shaped things" may evolve -- but it seems to me, only within certain tolerances. Thinking thusly, you can probably see why I would have a problem accepting the doctrine of abiogenesis -- that life "evolved" from non-life, that consciousness could have evolved from, not the unconscious, but the nonconscious. The "mystery principle" that could bridge such an unliklihood seems not to have been found yet. I suspect it's not there to be found....
Perhaps the dramatically burgeoning number of details and their seeming complexity may arise, to some degree, because people expect perfect randomness, where randomness in actuality is constrained in some fashion? Perhaps if people would understand that, a reduction in details and their apparent complexity would follow? Natural law seems to have a strong affinity with simplicity and elegance; when this is lacking, perhaps we ought to speculate that we haven't found our "fugitive" law yet, that the simplest, irreducibly fundamental, most comprehensive explanation for the phenomena we see all around us eludes us still....
The odd thought occasionally strikes me: Perhaps from a vantage point outside our own dimensional time/space, what looks to us like perfect chaos views as perfect order....
Which gets us into physical laws -- which constrain. But constrain -- for what purpose? And if there is purpose -- what is the goal, the end in view? And who's end is it anyway?
Thanks for chatting with me, js1138, and indulging me in my little speculations.