Leonard said:
How can blind cave fish could result purely from random mutations (among several sub species no less)? I believe that several billion tetras must have been sucked into Mexican caves in order for "random mutations" to account for this.
You do know that there's more to Darwinism than random mutation, right? The important part is natural selection, which is just a shorthand for organisms with slightly different genomes having slightly different average successes at reproduction. Over many generations, even slight differences in average reproductive success can have large effects on populations.
I would imagine it would take relatively few generations for cave fish to become blind and then eyeless, as eyes are quite complex structures that require a large investment of resources to build correctly. As most random mutations in the genes controlling eyes would tend to produce less effective eyes, the randomness of mutation and the selection pressure would both strongly tend towards eyeless forms.
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