When Darwin insisted that all biological improvement comes about through the mechanisms of mutation and natural selection there were plenty who found this difficult to accept. Some of the inventions of nature seemed far too clever to be ascribable completely to undirected processes. Critics were driven by this worry to suggest that creatures were genetically changed by the things learned during their lifetimes. An acquired characteristic could, on this suggestion, make the process of improvement easier for the next generation. It seems almost certain that inheritance of acquired characteristics does not, in fact, happen, yet the unease still remains. Nature has produced such astonishing artefacts. Can they all be the result of random processes? Alphomism does not allow the notion of randomness, except in the limited sense covering circumstances where we choose not to investigate causes. What it does suggest is that the weaker forces, built into the process by the Alphoma creators, set up favourable conditions for progress without precisely specifying what line that progress must take. The principles of genetic mutation and survival of the fittest are, on this formulation, very much preserved but with the added notion that evolution is steered by in-built tendencies for mutations to work towards ever more complex structures. BACK