Darwin’s “holy grail” centers on natural selection. Natural selection acts to select new things (variations). The question is, then—how do new variations arise? How does selection produce a species?

 In 1982, the late English paleontologist Colin Patterson, however, placed the origin of variations into perspective: “No one has ever produced a species by the mechanisms of natural selection. No one has ever got near it, and most of the current argument in neo-Darwinism is about this question: how a species originates. And it is there that natural selection seems to be fading out, and chance mechanisms of one sort or another are being invoked.”

 Actually, Darwin agrees: “But we are far too ignorant to speculate on the relative importance of the several known and unknown causes of variation.” Darwin continues: “Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound. Not in one case out of a hundred can we pretend to assign any reason why this or that part has varied.”

 On a scale of 1 to 10, how closer are we today in answering the question—how do new variations arise?