There is no "elusive mechanism of evolution"; there are an irreducible plurality of processes that make genotypes, phenotypes, ecologies, climates, cytologies, epsitemologies [Bateson's conjectures about know-how in light of thinking about the Baldwin effect]. We are quite a ways from elucidating and explaining to ourselves how those processes "hang" together...
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No doubt. But gaining a vision of the pluralities, or even beginning to conceive them has been held back for a very long time. There are key blind spots, and one of them is the world of physics in its most mundane sense.
I was greatly amused to read that Woese for example started in biophysics.
In a general sense most people in bio-science completely fail to see that living systems are embedded in a physical world of forces and processes that have always already been ordered. On the most abstract level, I think bio-science is just beginning to probe into the physical. It hasn't yet come to look at that inorganic world as a source of explanation. For some reason, life is still seen in opposition rather than in concordance.
What does this mean? I have a favorite diagram to illustrate the point. It is the morphology of a particular bat face that shows it is one complex sound transmitter-receiver, able by its shapes alone to account for this bat's ability to locate insects in the dark. It is an organic sonar station of shapes built into its face and sensory array. BTW this bat is very ugly and you immediately wonder, what on earth made this thing so damned nasty looking. The answer is the Horseshoe bat face was shaped by the physics of sound.
http://www.naturephoto-cz.com/photos/andera/mediterranean-horseshoe-bat-euryale.jpg
Just looking around this evening, I see there are some genetic studies on the hair proteins. I think I already know what is going on. Different strands vibrate or don't depending on their physical characteristics. So at a complete guess the proteins of the inner ear hairs of this bat have neat harmonic features that become transmission amplifiers within certain frequencies.
CG
