You don't even have to imagine that universe. I have seen computer programs that "evolve" virtual creatures whose body plans and primitive locomotion looks just like that of the the creatures from the cambrian explosion.
That is while there is random selection there is not random results.
It just looks like the line about how many are called but few are chosen. Why? because few actually meet the criteria called for.
So what's the criteria. There are zillions of things that have to go just right from the macro the micro in order for creatures such as ourselves to even exist.
I'm not saying this particularly means anything.
But random selection seems to presume a disorder at bottom of things that breaks against the evidence of the eyes as severely as any promulgation that there is an ultimate invisible order.
"But random selection seems to presume a disorder at bottom of things that breaks against the evidence of the eyes as severely as any promulgation that there is an ultimate invisible order."
Not necessarily. Natural Selection does not mean moving from a poorer organism to a better one, or from chaos to order or from imperfect to perfect. It means that organisms better suited to their environments survive and thrive.
Take elephants in Asia. We're now seeing elephant species evolve to be tuskless. The relatively few elephants born without the tendency to grow tusks are better suited to an environment where elephants are hunted for their tusks, so they survive to breed and tusked elephants are killed in greater numbers. Slowly, that is affecting the population and eventually under these circumstances tusked elephants will be the exception, a recessive trait that manifests rarely. The tusk trait may die out altogther.
Does that mean that the tuskless elephants somehow represent a more perfect elephant? Hardly. Elephants use their tusks to dig for food. Tuskless elephants have a harder time finding food, and would in other circumstances be at a competitive disadvantage. So they could be viewed as a "lesser" elephant, but are better adapted to survive in their particular environment.
That's natural selection in action. It cares not for perfection, or order, or anything else we might want to impose upon it. The only concern, if I may apply such an anthropomorphic term to a natural force, is which organisms will pass their genetic material on to future generations and how the species will evolve as a consequence.
...while there is random selection there is not random results.
Indeed. That's why Darwin realized that random variation needed to be supplemented with natural selection. The macro-environment 'decides' which random variations survive and which don't. But, again, there's a large element of chance in that, too, since otherwise very fit organisms occasionally have the bad luck to live at a time when, say, a 6-mile-wide asteroid hits their home planet. That sort of thing.
There are zillions of things that have to go just right from the macro the micro in order for creatures such as ourselves to even exist.
If 'zillions' means 'a whole lot' (grin), I agree completely.
But random selection seems to presume a disorder at bottom of things that breaks against the evidence of the eyes as severely as any promulgation that there is an ultimate invisible order.
This I don't quite agree with. Randomness is not incompatible with order. The periodic table of the elements shows how beautifully ordered our cosmos is from the bottom up. There are these quite distinct steps from the simplest elements up to the most complicated stable elements and beyond, each step corresponding to the presence of one additional proton in the nucleus. That's order. And, yet, when radiation impinges on an element, it's impossible to predict with certainty whether an electron will jump up to a higher energy level and then jump back down, radiating a photon of energy in the process. The best that we can do is predict the probability of such a transition (using the rules of quantum mechanics, which have to this day never failed to work). From the lowest sub-atomic level that we currently have access to on up, randomness and order go hand-in-hand.
The mistake that many make, it seems to me, is believing that, without a conscious director, nature is incapable of producing order. This conflicts with my own view of the astonishing fecundity of the physical.