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From Phillip Johnson's "Darwin on Trial:

"It is likely that Darwinist gradualism is statistically just as
unlikely as Goldschmidt's saltationism, once we give adequate atten-
tion to all the necessary elements. The advantageous micromuta-
tions postulated by neo-Darwinist genetics are tiny, usually too
small to be noticed. This premise is important because, in the words
of Richard Dawkins, "virtually all the mutations studied in genetics
laboratories-which are pretty macro because otherwise geneticists
wouldn't notice them-are deleterious to the animals possessing
them." But if the necessary mutations are too small to be seen, there
will have to be a great many of them (millions?) of the right type
coming along when they are needed to carry on the long-term
project of producing a complex organ.

The probability of Darwinist evolution depends upon the quan-
tity of favorable micromutations required to create complex organs
and organisms, the frequency with which such favorable micro-
mutations occur just where and when they are needed, the efficacy
of natural selection in preserving the slight improvements with
sufficient consistency to permit the benefits to accumulate, and the
time allowed by the fossil record for all this to have happened.
Unless we can make calculations taking all these factors into ac-
count, we have no way of knowing whether evolution by micromuta-
tion is more or less improbable than evolution by macromutation.

Some mathematicians did try to make the calculations, and the
result was a rather acrimonious confrontation between themselves
and some of the leading Darwinists at the Wistar Institute in Phila-
delphia in 1967. The report of the exchange is fascinating, notjust
because of the substance of the mathematical challenge, but even
more because of the logic of the Darwinist response. For example,
the mathematician D. S. Ulam argued that it was highly improbable
that the eye could have evolved by the accumulation of small muta-
tions, because the number of mutations would have to be so large
and the time available was not nearly long enough for them to
appear. Sir Peter Medawar and C. H. Waddington responded that
Ulam was doing his science backwards; the fact was that the eye had
evolved and therefore the mathematical difficulties must be only
apparent. Ernst Mayr observed that Ulam's calculations were based
on assumptions that might be unfounded, and concluded that

"Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all
right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred."