[wbarmy]

There is so much to attack when statements like this are made;

As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence "TOBEORNOTTOBE." Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days.

This is a totally inept analogy and faulty reasoning. The program made those choices based on a specific endstate. Is evolution picking its choices made on a specific endstate? If it is truly random, then there is no specified endstate for the "program" to match.

[freedumb2003]

>>This is a totally inept analogy and faulty reasoning. The program made those choices based on a specific endstate. Is evolution picking its choices made on a specific endstate? If it is truly random, then there is no specified endstate for the “program” to match. <<

Stochastism is a difficult concept for many to grasp. It should be an entry gate to almost every subject but we are too weak to posit that signpost.

[John Valentine]

Is evolution picking its choices made on a specific endstate? If it is truly random, then there is no specified endstate for the "program" to match.

True, as far as it goes, but only because there is no pre-selected end state, yet there is a criterion selected for and that criterion is survival within the local physical, chemical, and social environment. And that leads to many interim "end states", none permanent but many long enduring, despite the underlying randomness of the genetic changes driving the process.