Richard Dawkins

And being jumped.

Yes.

And I think it's probably true.

I mean, Dobzhansky had this theory that when new species form, when an ancestral species diverges to form new subspecies,

and then new species.

There is an intermediate and interregnum when natural selection favors anything to differentiate them, anything to make them sound different or look different or smell different, to exaggerate the difference.

And so there is a kind of acceleration of the speciation process.

Well, drift is, in a way, the opposite of natural selection.

Evolutionary change can come about through drift.

where there's no selective force.

There's no advantage in this gene or that gene.

It's just random drift.

And that's probably a very important force in evolution.

It's not the force that produces interesting things.

It's not the force that produces adaptation, that produces better wings, better legs, better voices.

But especially if you look at a molecular level,

If you look at evolution molecularly, what you see is that changes are neutral.

It's rather like changing the font on your word processor from Geneva to Times New Roman.

The meaning is the same, but the actual letters are different.

So that's an extreme example of drift, and it's very important.