Beneficial Mutations Made Simple

"Believe in them" in what sense? I mean, the very way you phrase this tells me that, like us, you accept the reality that, rarely, beneficial mutations do occur.Given that a selective power exists that promotes the beneficial and eliminates the detrimental, what's the relevance that they're rare? If you pick and choose the beneficial and discard the detrimental - as natural selection does - the fact that they're rare doesn't matter. Beneficial mutations will still be all you have left.It's like the way they make microchips. I don't know what you know about computers - CPUs that they charge $200 bucks to make actually only cost about 10-20 bucks to manufacture, ship, package, and retail. They don't cost all that much.The reason that you have to pay so much is because, out of all the CPUs they manufacture, less than 1 in 10 or 20 actually work. The rest are rendered completely useless by flaws in the silicon substrate they're photoetched on. When you plop down $200 bucks for an AMD Athlon XP Venice core, you're actually paying for not only that chip, but the 20 others that failed one or another pre-retail test and were sent right to the dumpster.Like beneficial mutations, functional CPUs are quite rare. But a selective process exists in both situations to discard the bad and leave only the good, so the rarity doesn't matter. You can still buy a functional CPU for your computer; you can still expect to see beneficial mutations occuring in the natural world, and we do. Well, now you're contradicting yourself. Do they happen rarely, or do they not happen at all? You may see those as the same thing, but that's not correct. If beneficial mutations happen rarely, evolution happens. If beneficial mutations don't ever happen, there's no evolution.But you can't have it both ways. So which is it?

Er, wait. See, you keep confusing me. Are you saying they never happen, or that they happen rarely?You're contradicting yourself all over the place, here. Which is it?