1. A blind-variation-and-selective-retention process is fundamental to all inductive achievements, to all genuine increases in knowledge, to all increases in fit of system to environment.
2. In such a process there are three essentials: (a) Mechanisms for introducing variation; (b) Consistent selection processes; and (c) Mechanisms for preserving and/or propagating the selected variations. Note that in general the preservation and generation mechanisms are inherently at odds, and each must be compromised.
3. The many processes which shortcut a more full blind-variation-and-selective-retention processes are in themselves inductive achievements, containing wisdom about the environment achieved originally by blind variation and selective retention.
4. In addition, each shortcut processes contain in their own operation a blind-variation-and-selective-retention process at some level, substituting for overt locomotor exploration or the life-and-death winnowing of organic evolution.

The word "blind" is used rather than the more usual "random"... Equiprobability is not needed... certain processes involving systemic sweep scanning are recognized as blind, insofar as variations are produced without prior knowledge of which ones, if any, will furnish a selectworthy encounter.

p.57 An essential connotation of "blind" is that the variations emitted be independent of the environmental conditions of the occasion of their occurrence. A second important connotation is that the occurrence of trials individually be uncorrelated with the solution, in that specific correct trials are no more likely to occur at any one point in a series of trials than another, nor than specific incorrect trials. A third essential connotation of "blind" is rejection of the notion that a variation subsequent to an incorrect trial is a "correction" of the previous trial or makes use of the direction of error of the previous one.

p.57 In going beyond what is already known, one cannot but go blindly.

p.58 Only indirectly, through selecting the selectors, does life-and-death relevance select the responses.

p.58-59 Vicarious locomotor devices. Substituting for spatial exploration by locomotor trial and error are a variety of distance receptors of which a ship's radar is an example. An automated ship could explore the environment of landfalls... by a trial and error of full movements and collisions. Instead, it sends out substitute locomotions in the form of a radar beam. These are selectively reflected from nearby objects, the reflective opaqueness to this wave band vicariously representing the locomotor impenetrability of the objects. This vicarious representability is a contingent discovery, and is in fact only approximate. The knowledge received is reconfirmed as acted upon by the full ship's locomotion. The process removes the trial-and-error component from the overt locomotion, locating it instead in the blindly emitted radar beam... (The radar beam is, however, emitted in a blind exploration, albeit a systematic sweep.)

p.63 After the repeated survey of a field has afforded for the interposition of advantageous accidents, has rendered all the traits that suit with the word or the dominant thought more vivid, and has gradually relegated to the background all things that are inappropriate, making their future appearance impossible... Thus are to be explained the statements of Newton, Mozart, Richard Wagner, and others, when they say that thoughts, melodies, and harmonies had poured in upon them, and that they had simply retained the right ones.

p.63 [Poincar�] One evening, contrary to custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas arose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.... What happens then? Among the great numbers of combinations blindly formed by the subliminal self, almost all are without interest and without utility; but just for that reason they are also without effect upon the aesthetic sensibility. Consciousness will never know them; only certain ones are harmonious, and consequently, at once useful and beautiful.

p.64 It would be an error to suppose that the great discoverer seizes at once upon the truth or has any unerring method of divining it. In all probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one.

p.64-65 For every single idea of a judicious and reasonable nature which offers itself to us, what hosts of frivolous, bizarre, and absurd ideas cross our minds.. It is after hours and years of meditation that the sought-after idea presents itself to the inventor. He does not succeed without going astray many times

p.66 Computer problem solving is a highly relevant topic, and is perhaps best introduced at this point. Like thinking, it requires vicarious explorations of a vicarious representation of the environment, with the exploratory trials being selected by criteria which are vicarious representations of solution requirements or external realities. The present writer would insist here too, that if discovery or expansions of knowledge are achieved, blind variation is requisite... The "selectivity", insofar as it is appropriate, represents already achieved wisdom of a more general sort, and as such, selectivity does not in any sense explain an innovative solution.

p.67 Beyond thus applying what is already known, albeit only a partial truth, the new discoveries must be produced by a blind generation of alternatives.

p.79 Trial implies a problematical and alternative result: either the success of the assumption put to trial or its failure.

p.83 [Waddington] The faculties by which we arrive at a world view have been selected so as to be, at least, efficient in dealing with other existents. They may, in Kantian terms, not give us direct contact with the thing-in-itself, but they have been moulded by things-in-themselves so as to be competent in coping with them.

p.85 Lorenz, and many others, have argued that the mind has been shaped by evolution to fit those aspects of the world with which it deals, just as have other body parts:

This central nervous apparatus does not prescribe the laws of nature any more than the hoof of the horse prescribes the form of the ground. Just as the hoof of the horse, this central nervous apparatus stumbles over unforeseen changes in its task. But just as the hoof of the horse is adapted to the ground of the steppe which it copes with, so our central nervous apparatus for organizing the image of the world is adapted to the real world with which man has to cope. Just like any organ, this apparatus has attained its expedient species-preserving form through this coping of real with the real during a species history many eons long.

The shape of a horse's hoof certainly expresses "knowledge" of the steppe in a very odd and partial language, and in an end product mixed with "knowledge" of other contingencies.

p.89 It is argued that, whereas the evolutionary perspective has often led to a pragmatic, utilitarian conventionalism, it is fully compatible with an advocacy of the goals of realism and objectivity in science.