I have been reading this article on drug resistance which explained that how random mutations in a bacterial colony can lead to development of drug resistance among some organisms in that colony.
A thought occurred to me that if mutations are just random (by random what I know (or think) here is the number and time of a mutation occurring in an organism in a normal environment may not be fixed but random) events arising from copy errors during DNA replications then how come some animals in nature mimic their surroundings to save themselves from predators or catch prey?
Let's consider for the time being that an animal exhibiting mimicry have evolved through natural selection, after suffering a mutation in their DNA which made them well adapted to their environment, and also saved them from their predators. Now we know a fit organism, in the struggle for existence, produces offsprings which can withstand the adversities of the surroundings and thus increases in numbers. In this way we may assume that due to many such helpful mutations led to the evolution of a new species.
This may sound simple but it actually seems to me as an over simplification of the events that lead to the development of 'that' new species. First of all not all mutations are helpful. Some are lethal as well. Also mutations may often be silent due to the degeneracy of the genetic code and presence of introns in the eukaryote. But let us consider here that the mutation suffered by our test organism was neither silent nor harmful, that too leaves us with infinite number of mutation possibilities to get a favourable organism from an unfit (to the surrounding in which our test organism is struggling) parent generation. Thus I think nature may not test each and every kind of possibility to select the fit one because in that case the test organisms will be far too many in number. Also if we consider that the fit one emerged just by chance out of million other possibilities then its sure that it was either too lucky or there is some other factor except 'just' mutation which can explain mimicry. Thus can only general mutation explain mimicry or we need something more to explain it?