Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Natural selection is anything but random.
The real problem with natural selection is that it makes no intuitive sense. It is like quantum physics; we may intellectually grasp it, but it will never feel right to us.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.
It's an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical - it is in any animal merely statistical - not deterministic.
The reason for natural selection's great success is that it provides a satisfying explanation of how evolution might have occurred: individual organisms vary, and if those variations are inherited, the successful ones will survive and propagate and pass down their desirable traits to succeeding generations.
Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.
The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on.
One can say with reasonable confidence that the likelihood of something analogous to a human evolving is really pretty high.
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