That's a fiendishly long time to wait for the next book of the month club selection.
Now if we include some natural selection process, and factor in the cost of feeding the monkeys -- not to mention handling any evoution they might undergo, this becomes intolerably ridiculous. A book that is never read. A cost that is unbearable.
Natural selection implies timing and ripeness. A mutant creature surviving at time A will not survive at Time B some periods later. The mix of selections will change.
The odds for natural selection as the mechanism for making us what we are today are unimaginably long ....
Natural selection does not imply a destination. When at point A, there are a nearly infinite number of potential point Bs.
You are engaged in restrospective astonishment, the assumption that point B was destiny.
We have a word for situations where natural selection requires a specified complex adaptation, and the adaptation is not forthcoming.
The word is extinction.
But, as you agreed, the probability for anyone sequence is the same as that for any other sequence, and here we are.
Natural selection implies timing and ripeness. A mutant creature surviving at time A will not survive at Time B some periods later. The mix of selections will change.
Natural selection is always working, pruning invididuals and species. It doesn't rest, it doesn't think, it doesn't foresee, it doesn't worry. If a mutation confers an adaptive advantage, the mutation survives and replicates itself in some subset of a population; if not, it doesn't. End of story.
It's estimated that there are currently between 3 million and 50 million species of biological organisms on Earth. The recently deceased Ernst Mayr has estimated that since the beginning of life on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago, as many as 1 billion species have come and gone. If species A can't hack it, species B will take its niche. The species that exist currently are the result of ruthless pruning by natural selection and, more recently, by anthropogenic selection.