I had forgotten about that. You're right, the more advanced an organism is, the more genetic background it has to draw on to develop new structures and processes. But how are these triggered, brought to the forefront again when needed? Is only random selection operating to do so. The Lamarckian idea is very compelling, but every attempt to actually demonstrate it in nature has failed.

Perhaps something like Larmarckian environmentally-induced changes do occur, but they are transmitted through sexual chromosome exchange and don't manifest themselves immediately so we don't notice them in the laboratory or in the field. I'm only speculating here, I have no evidence of this at all, but it would go a long way towards explaining away some of my questions. Perhaps coded in the DNA are not only records of past successes, but proposals, requests, for future changes, which are somehow transmitted from the needs of living organisms to those archived genes. Maybe this is why vertebrates (with the exception of fish) produce so few offspring. They don't need those vast numbers for the statistics to operate. Perhaps vertebrate nervous systems are sophisticated enough to edit DNA directly, rewrite the genetic code, and pull those triggers.

It's a scary thought, but if I can conceive of it, nature can probably do much better.