I can easily break your theory by saying what if variation didn't change the reproduction at all but dropped the death rate? for example by better resistance against an illness. This will only lengthen the life span of that specie and cause them to be a dominant specie as you pointed out.
Without reproduction the species would still die out in a single generation, even if that generation lived twice as long as the last. Also, without differential reproduction the number of individuals with the advantageous gene would stay the same generation to generation.
Pay attention that in this whole entire process the reproduction stays the same with no changes at all. So reproduction can't be the target.
How can you talk about genetics changing within a population over time without involving reproduction? Care to explain?
I totally understand. You see there are several abstraction layers here which seems to be confused. At lower level you are absolutely right. But at higher level if you consider probabilities and long time span then you will find that the process is not blind at all and even doesn't look blind! We see a proper target and vivid forces work together to get to that target. This target or targets might be there by chance but that doesn't make them non-existant.
Care to give an example within biology? For example, if the wing for a vertebrate were a target then why are the flying fish wing, the bat wing, and the bird wing so different?
I give you an example to understand it deeply. In quantum world there is no way that you can say for example an electron is located where at a specific time around in hydrogen atom. It is all probabilistic and that individual electron blindly and randomly revolves around the core and stay in proximity by the forces evolved. But this whole concept doesn't mean that we can't draw a probability graph of the area that single electron stays most of its time. You can't say because the process is random and blind, we can't find any area. In fact calculating this orbitals is a key concept in quantum theory and whole chemistry is based on it. Even you can predict what an atom will do in a chemical reaction based on these orbitals without knowing what happens at lower abstraction layer. That's the beauty of probability theory.
You have a lot of different concepts all muddled together. Are you saying that an electron in an oxygen atom has the goal of water in mind before it comes in contact with a hydrogen atom?
Perhaps a better analogy would be the game of craps. Are the probabilities of specific role increased when someone makes a bet on it? For example, if I put my bet on the Pass line on the come out roll do the odds increase for rolling a 7 or 11? They don't, do they. The dice are not trying to meet a goal. Evolution is the same way. The mutations that occur are not aimed at a specific target. They are random in the same way that the roll of the dice is random with respect to the bets on the table. The mutations that get passed on to the next generation are the mutations that work, no matter how they work.
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