[maro]

First--"quantum leap" literally means very short hops, and shouldn't be used in the way you used it. Second, you are stuck with the photomorph concept, and that's why you don't get it. Let me try a third metaphor. Say you and your son are asked to compete in a soapbox derby, but are given only 48 hours to come up with an entry. Fortunately, your garage is well stocked with all the necessary tools and hardware. Moreover, you and your son are mechanical geniuses. It is certainly plausible, based on these assumptions, that the result of the 48 hours of work will be a derby winner. Now add another constraint. Every hour, or half hour, or minute, your vehicle in its state at that time will be taken out on the track. If it doesn't make a circuit, you are disqualified. You protest against the new rule: most of my engineering ideas will take a while to implement, and it's not fair to test the vehicle while I'm in the middle of one of my ideas--the idea may be great, but the vehicle may be temporarily inoperable. I think that's how it is with all these nifty improvements you suggest to the human body. If you could actually code these changes (without harming some other useful process), more than a few bit flips would be needed. So the path to the improvement probably will pass through (and necessarily pass through) intermediates that don't run, or are hopelessly defective in some significant way. According to evolutionary theory, genetic change is entirely the product of chance bit flips, so changes to the DNA happen piecemeal, and every slightly modified life form is required to survive in its environment, just as the referees hauled out the unfinished soapbox racer every hour, half hour, or minute against your protests, onto the track.

[general_re]

First--"quantum leap" literally means very short hops, and shouldn't be used in the way you used it.

Actually, it means "an abrupt change, sudden increase, or dramatic advance", so I think I pretty well said what I wanted to say.

In any case, now we're off to the soapbox derby. Just speaking generally, you're still falling into the teleological trap of think of evolution in terms of goals and end-products - either you have a working racer, or you have a pile of junk. Either you have a working clock, or you have a bunch of gears and springs. Either you have a fully-formed human, or you have nothing. Either you have a fully-formed bird, or you have nothing.

And it just doesn't work that way. There is no "goal" such that you can declare the intermediate steps unfit and therefore unable to have existed. Over time, a group of smallish dinosaurs accumulate changes and improvements such that they gradually become birds. Over time, a group of smallish primates accumulate changes and become early humans. Nowhere in there is there the sense that we either have fully formed book-reading humans, or we have nothing - which is exactly what I am expected to draw from the soapbox racer analogy. It's an evolutionary process, not a quantum leap from a pile of junk to the finished product. Every creature is transitional. Every creature is a "final" product. Organisms exist of themselves, according to what they are right now, not according to some standard of what they might be someday.

It's just not a very good analogy. You want to judge an organism's fitness against what it could become in the future. But it's precisely because there is no "goal" that you can't do that. All of the organisms on the planet today are still subject to selection pressures - evolution is continuing, even as we speak. All of the plants and animals around you are transitional forms that in millions of years, whose descendants very likely to bear little or no resemblance to what they are today. Now, if your analogy held true, you ought to be able to tell me what they will become, and we could then thereby judge which of the organisms that we see around us can't possibly exist ;)