[newguy357]

But the selection process itself is not random.

And I haven't said otherwise. Fill a bucket full of red and green jelly beans at random. Now select five. Repeat this experiment a thousand times, always filling the bucket at random. The selection process is not random (always "select five" or in the case of evolution "select that which reproduces most") yet the overall result is still random because you're beginning with a random distribution.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"Fill a bucket full of red and green jelly beans at random. Now select five. Repeat this experiment a thousand times, always filling the bucket at random. The selection process is not random..."

The selection WOULD be random in your jelly bean example. It's not at all how natural selection works. It matters not if you selected 5 at a time or 1 or 20. The jelly beans selected have nothing to do with whether they are green or red. When you were finished collecting them 5 at a time, you would end up with the exact same ratio of red to green. What you are describing is a random selection process, not just a random distribution.

With natural selection, there is a bias toward one trait or another(technically it's the entire suite of traits that make up an organism that gets selected), and that bias comes from the environment. The whole point is that some traits are better than others in any particular environment. Red does not provide the same fitness as green, to use the jelly bean analogy. Instead of randomly selecting every jelly bean you pick up, natural selection would bias the results so that perhaps you take twice as many red as green. Even if the amount of red was small compared to the green at the beginning, in time it would dominate. (Your jellybean analogy doesn't take into account reproduction and selection over many generations, where *jelly beans* would get lost (die before reproduction) and others that were biased for would multiply beyond their original numbers).

Natural selection is not random.