What made a fish fly, a turtle dive, or even a sea horse?!

The world in which we live is the most remarkable place.

After returning from a diving expedition in the Andaman sea off the coast of Thailand I can safely safe that evolution is a wonderful thing. I have never seen so many variations of creatures in all my life. There are numerous varieties of clown-fish who have been 'copied' by fake clown-fish. Shrimps of all kinds, each specialised in their field. The ecosystem is a complex web of interdependency which has to be the most stunning thing that this planet has to offer. Every time I have an encounter with a new culture, a new ecosystem or even a single new animal then I am stunned by the sheer diversity and the time it must have taken for all of this to occur.

Evolution is a widely accepted paradigm for how this occured in the natural world and when you make your way across the ocean, hopping from remote island to remote island it is put clearly into focus. But even with my childish understanding of evolution coming from a high-school statement, "survival of the fittest" coupled with my equally crude understanding of genetic inheritance I have some problems with evolution as an idea. I studied Physics at university - I wasn't very good (lack of focus, lack of maturity) - and I am quite familiar with modes of stability. Surely the evolutionary process is more than the success and survival of the 'most suitable' candidate from all the variations appearing from all the combinations provided by generations of a particular species? When or how is a new species defined? How does a new genus occur? If random mutations are filtered out by a level of 'fitness' (natural selection), then there is a direction to evolutionary processes. If there is a direction is there also a size - a evolutionary vector or, more naturally, a tensor? If this is the case, how do we model this? How do we identify the filters being applied? If we can identify the filters then we ought to be able to extrapolate the evolution of a particular organism (I would expect this to be extremely complex, and not an exact science). Flipping this on it's head, presumably, looking back into the past from an evolutionary perspective must also be an extremely important tool - another way to identify the 'evolutionary vector' and therefore gain some understanding of the 'fitness filters'.

Googling this a little has informed me that strains of cold virus proteins look to mutatue a million times more quickly than human proteins... does that help answer my questions? Of course, my next obvious question was, "can the cold virus evolve into something more complex than a virus?" i.e. could it form the basis of a new life-form... whether a virus is a life-form is yet another debate - but suffuce it to say that viruses are symbiots (therefore, instead of "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" the question could be "which came first, the virus or the bacteria?").

Here's an interesting link on the subject about whether there's more to mutuation. "Bacteria take the chance out of evolution"
Round and round I go...

I guess where I am heading is - has the mathmetical modelling of an evolutionary vector produced results that have actually been matched in a laboratory environment or are some modes more stable than others for reasons other than just environment? Does some 'selection' occur even before the new strains start to exist? Looking at it this way helps me understand that the evolutionary process is probably more 'weighted' than my high-school education led me to believe. However, it doesn't give me an answer to "how do new genotypes get created?". Am I even asking a meaningful question? After all, a genus is a categorisation that us humans have placed upon a living organism in order for us to help identify it - probably a mere result of how our minds work than anything else.
Bio-diversity is a hot-topic... here's another interesting link about bio-diveristy and species classification
So, genetic engineering is a new form of evolution - a crude tool, but nonetheless a form of evolution. I don't know about you, but I want to continue to see lots of variety and similarity in our oceans, our rainforests, our deserts... I don't want species to disappear because they aren't 'useful' to humanity or because their environment is being 'evolved' more rapidly than they can.
Our environment is not a resource, it's our shared home.