There are two ways the Phyllidae could have acquired the appearance of a chewed on leaf: With the leaf as a model the insect made a sudden appearance in its present form. Or it evolved purely by chance after trying all possible intermediate stages, without the model leaf playing any role in the evolution. If you believe the first you are a creationist, a believer in intelligent design. If the second a Darwinist, a believer in evolution and survival of the fittest.

Neither view is credible. The first would reject evolution, the evidence for which is undeniable. The second is too great a strain on common sense, with all due allowance for the eons of time that organisms had to evolve. After all, the leaves of plants also evolved, so they and the Phyllidae would have had to evolve in parallel, which could not have happened without interaction between the two.

We are where physics was at the turn of the twentieth century. We need a new theory.

Suppose we postulate that nature possesses templates of structures which it derives from mechanisms similar to the patterns chaos theory produces on certain mathematical manipulations. Evolution then would be directed rather than completely random, which would greatly reduce the number of intermediate stages any particular organism would go through in its evolutionary progression. Enough of these intermediate stages would be competitive and survive and adapt to changing environmental conditions. Darwin’s theory is convincing, but there must be interaction between species and their environment. The process can not be completely random. What that interaction is we have no clue. An environmental factor must trigger a gene change within a template of limited permissible changes.

This, of course, is not a scientific theory because it does not lead to a test by experiment. But it is an interesting speculation which allows a third choice in the argument between creationists and the believers in random evolution.