Evolutionary Judaism

Further to my post http://tanakhemet.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/winners-and-losers.html
I wish to discuss the concept of Evolutionary theory when applied to Judaism  and religion in general.

The Winners and Losers post was a survival of the fittest type argument, namely that Rabbanism has maintained its force over the millenia, and is thriving now in the Jewish world, while other branches are falling apart, eg Conservative and Reform.   This is an evolutionary type argument. Another evolutionary argument is that a system survives and maintains its strength because certain factors of that (religious) system are able to capture the minds of followers, and replicate, whereas others are not so successful.   Some systems, such as Karaism , and Conservative, had their Golden age, but now are not as dynamic as Orthodox Rabbinic.

However, there are some logical flaws to this argument.  Firstly, there were times when Orthodoxy was in crisis, in the last 2 centuries, and has collapsed from  being perhaps representative of 90% of the Judaic world, to around 10%.  In the USA, Conservative has overall more numbers, but the numbers and synagogue members are in decline. Going back,  Christianity was originally a branch of Judaism. From an evolutionary perspective it was very successful, being able to branch out into a new religion of its own, and still have a significant number of "Messianic" Jewish followers.
Furthermore, in the TanaKh, we have a success of idolatry, in evolutionary terms, and a failure of the Prophetic Judaism of the Bible, in purely numerical terms.  This is to the point where the prophets bemoan the behaviors of the idolaters.
So evolutionary Judaism tells us nothing about the truth of a particular proposition. It does tell us about the the survival of a particular species over its competitors. Karaism can again enjoy a Golden age, but perhaps can evolve and engage with the wider Jewish world, especially the 80% who are not strictly bound to any particular halachic code.