I've long been noting the existential despair lurking behind certain proponents of neo-Darwinism. I had one anthropology professor who was inclined to share his despair with the whole lecture hall. He would basically repeat a less poetic version of MacBeth's lament: tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, etc.
Curiously enough, the hard Darwinian commitment to random mutation doesn't translate into a willingness to consider a irrationalist epistemology that adapts by means of random ideas. I once tried to glean Daniel Dennett's opinion on the matter when he lectured on meme theory. Meme theory, with its almost pathological language of infection, dispersion, and so forth, seems to me to be most amenable to irrationalism, but Dennett simply gave the gruff, curt reply that such application was an abuse of the theory.
Anyway, somebody has put together a nice little Thomistic treatise on chance and design in evolutionary philosophy and the philosophy of its major opponents. See A Designer Universe: Chance, Design, and Cosmic Order
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