Yes, exactly.
Check out the February 2003 issue of Scientific American. In it, you'll find an article demonstrating that a mere "week of accidents" (evolution let loose on a circuit design problem) is "more intelligent than all the electronic engineers in history".
It produced a cubic signal generator circuit that a) outperformed the best ever produced by human circuit designers, b) should easily win a patent, and c) is so sophisticated that no one's been able to figure out how in the hell it works yet.
There are thousands of highly intelligent scientists in Universities, at Pharmaceuticals and doing private investigative research.
Not all of them working on the same problem, of course...
One of the strengths of evolution is that in effect every single organism everywhere is in effect a test case simultaneously working on the solution to the problem, "how to better survive and reproduce". It's like the most massively parallel computer in the universe, and it's been operating for a billion years now. No wonder it's come up with a bunch of really slick results.
And billions of years of unintelligent events are supposed to be more capable of creating chemical experiments with billions of successes just to produce a simple organism.
Notwithstanding your wild overestimate that it takes a "billion successes" for just a "simple organism", the answer is, yes.
Vast Databases
At the moment of conception, a fertilized human egg is about the size of a pinhead. Yet it contains information equivalent to about six billion "chemical letters." This is enough information to fill 1000 books, 500 pages thick with print so small you would need a microscope to read it!
If all the chemical "letters" in the human body were printed in books, it is estimated they would fill the Grand Canyon fifty times!
This vast amount of information is stored in our bodies' cells in DNA molecules and is coded by four bases-adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. The key to the coding of DNA is in the grouping of these bases into sets that are further sequenced to form the 20 common amino acids. Together, these genetic codes form the physical foundation of all life.
We've all been exposed to the basic concepts of DNA and its double-helix structure in our high school biology classes. Perhaps you remember being taught that cells divide through the "unzipping" and subsequent replication of the double helix. In all likelihood, though, the incredible evidence of design in this process was not discussed.
A Complex Engineering Puzzle
Suppose you were asked to take two long strands of fisherman's monofilament line-125 miles long-then form it into a double-helix structure and neatly fold and pack this line so it would fit into a basketball.
Furthermore, you would need to ensure that the double helix could be unzipped and duplicated along the length of this line, and the duplicate copy removed, all without tangling the line. Possible?
This is directly analogous to what happens in the billions of cells in your body every day. Scale the basketball down to the size of a human cell and the line scales down to six feet of DNA.
All this DNA must be packed so the regulator proteins that control making copies of the DNA have access to it. The DNA packing process is both complex and elegant and is so efficient that it achieves a reduction in length of DNA by a factor of 1 million.
When the cell needs to divide, the entire length of DNA must be split apart, duplicated, and repackaged for each daughter cell. No one knows exactly how cells solve this topological nightmare. But the solution clearly starts with the special spools on which the DNA is wound.
Each spool carries two "turns" of DNA, and the spools themselves are stacked together in groups of six or eight. The human cell uses about 25 million of them to keep its DNA under control. 4 (As shown in Figure 3 on the previous page, DNA is wound around histones to form nucleosomes. These are organized into solenoids, which in turn compose chromatin loops. Each element in this complex, yet highly organized arrangement is carefully designed to play a key role in the cell replication process.)
Cell Replication
The details of cell replication are too complex to be described in detail here. A simplified outline is given below to illustrate the incredible process involved:
1. Replication involves the synthesis of an exact copy of the cell's DNA.
2. An initiator protein must locate the correct place in the strand to begin copying.
3. The initiator protein guides an "unzipper" protein (helicase) to separate the strand, forming a fork area. This unwinding process involves speeds estimated at approximately 8000 rpm, all done without tangling the DNA strand!
4. The DNA duplex kinks back on itself as it unwinds. To relieve the twisting pressure, an "untwister" enzyme (topo-isomerase) systematically cuts and repairs the coil.
5. Working only on flat, untwisted sections of the DNA, enzymes go to work copying the strand. (Two complete DNA pairs are synthesized, each containing one old and one new strand.)
6. A stitcher repair protein (DNA ligases) connects nucleotides together into one continuous strand.
Read and Write
The process described above is only a small part of the story. While the unwinding and rewinding of the DNA takes place, an equally sophisticated process of reading the DNA code and "writing" new strands occurs. The process involves the production and use of messenger RNA. Again, a simplified process description:
1. Messenger RNA is made from DNA by an enzyme (RNA polymerase).
2. A small section of DNA unzips, revealing the actual message (called the sense strand) and the template (the anti-sense strand).
3. A copy is made of the gene of interest only, producing a relatively short RNA segment.
4. The knots and kinks in the DNA provide crucial topological stop-and-go signals for the enzymes.
5. After messenger RNA is made, the DNA duplex is zipped back up.
Adding to the complexity and sophistication of design, the genetic code is read in blocks of three bases (out of the four possible bases mentioned earlier) that are non-overlapping.
Moreover, the triplicate code used is "degenerate," meaning that multiple combinations can often code for the same amino acid-this provides a built-in error correction mechanism. (One can't help but contrast the sophistication involved with the far simpler read/write processes used in modern computers.)
This is an ironic weakness of evolutionary algorithms and the like. They could produce incredibly powerful artifacts but they'd be so complex we couldn't understand how they work.