Even if mutations galore increased the genetic diversity enormously in a population or gene/allele pool, even to the point that every trait is changed for every individual and every gene has so many alleles you can't identify them, what you'd have is a motley crew of individuals that differ wildly from one another in all those traits, some large, some small, some with purple fur, some with scales instead of fur, and every possible combination. Clearly it doesn't ever happen. But if it did some particular number of individuals would have to be selected in order to get a new breed or species, that is, for evolution of the population as a whole to occur. Which would have to happen to get a new species.
And selection eliminates. If you get an isolated new population of all these individuals with all their new characteristics that population will eventually blend those characteristics together until a particular phenotype emerges and it's got a look of its own: a new breed or species. That's what selection does. It will eventually blend tog3ether whatever proportions of traits are in the new set of individuals, their new collection of gene/allele frequencies, and eliminate others from the population. (Of course if mutations really did occur at such a rate as I describe it above you could never ever get a population with its own peculiar characteristics, never a breed let alone a pure breed, which already defeats the whole idea but anyway...) Unless you want to say that getting only a population made up of mutts is evolution, because that's all you'll ever get; you'll never get the specialized new phenotypes ordinarily recognized as a new species or breed, you know a whole population with the same characteristics, a whole population of trilobites that look alike, a whole population of raccoons with identical markings, a whole breed of greyhounds or chihuahuas or Great Danes, a whole population of little green men with antennae on their heads.
Not only is there no "rate of evolution," there is no evolution as defined by the ToE.
abe: What you call speciation could never happen, which is a population with its own overall characteristics that clearly differentiate it from its parent population. (Of course it would have sufficiently diminished genetic diversity to make further evolution impossible, but anyway....
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.