Material Causality, Swerve, Mutation

Deleuze cites the Epicurean concept of Clinamen as a forerunner of his concept of Difference, probably familiar to him via the representation of it by Lucretius, better known these days as Swerve.  The Philosophical significance of these concepts is their independence from the concept of Identity, to which it is otherwise more generally reduced or subordinated.  According to Lucretius, Swerve is a fundamental principle of Nature, to which he attributes experimentation, some results of which anticipate Darwinist concepts, including Adaptation and the Survival of the Fittest.  However, Lucretius does not connect Swerve with the origin of a Species, thereby missing its application to the motor of Evolution--Mutation.  But despite the more recent growing prominence of Darwinism, that application remains beyond the ken of the Philosophical mainstream, which, even when the significance of Evolution is recognized, struggles to explain it with accepted concepts such as Efficient Causality, Teleological Causality, or even Emergence.  In contrast, Mutation is an instance of Material Causality, so the latter is more adequate to the concept of Evolution than any of the traditional alternatives.