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> dhw: "[i]Either innovations work or they don&apos;t, and if they do, they are already complex, even if they survive and later become even more complex. It therefore seems to me that evolution doesn&apos;t depend on gradualism at all. Perhaps someone can enlighten me.[/i]"-There is a section in Ernst Mayr&apos;s "What Evolution Is" that deals with this subject, though as I&apos;ve said before I&apos;m not a biologist and I find the language difficult to follow. He points out that: "individuals in a single population may differ by visibly different characters" (he cites eye colour and number of molars). He continues: "A successful mutation with a large phenotypic effect can be gradually incorporated into a population as long as it is able to pass through a period of polymorphism in which it coexists with the previous phenotype, until it has completely displaced the original gene." He ends with "it must be remembered that there is a considerable range in the size of the mutations that lead to evolutionary change". Later on he says: "Darwinian gradualism is due to the gradual restructuring of populations."