[allmendream]

Not critical to the analogy. The analogy was that you don't make history unless you work and had an impact. You don't make the fossil record unless you were successful enough as a species prolific and wide spread enough to get some members of your species fossilized.

Natural selection is not random either. It is a trial and error process that keeps designs that work and discards designs that do not work.

Check out “directed evolution” as an example of how novel enzymes are made for industrial purposes by random variation and selecting for the necessary traits.

It is a MUCH more powerful system for designing enzymes, right now, then attempting to design an enzyme with the necessary traits on paper and then making it in the lab.

[allmendream]

Directed evolution allows us to explore enzyme functions never required in the natural environment and for which the molecular basis is poorly understood. This bottom-up design approach contrasts with the more conventional, top-down one in which proteins are tamed `rationally’ using computers and site-directed mutagenesis. I will describe how molecular evolution can be directed in the test tube in order to produce useful biocatalysts

http://www.che.caltech.edu/groups/fha/Enzyme/directed.html

[betty boop]

Natural selection is not random either. It is a trial and error process that keeps designs that work and discards designs that do not work.

And so please tell what standard against which this process of trial and error — non-random! as you say (but it still looks pretty random to me, especially if we are to think of it as "goal-less" and "undirected") — is to be measured? What is the standard that decides what works and what doesn't work in Nature? Especially if Nature is said to have no purposes of her own?

If there are no purposes in Nature, then how can natural selection not be random ?