And just to be clear, you're still wrong.
Organisms endure their "fitness test" by living their lives and reproducing successfully, *or* dying early and/or failing to mate and produce offspring (or similarly, by producing more offspring than their fellow organisms).
There's no intelligence involved at all. Their "fitness" is weighed and measured simply by the difficulties of survival in the wild. They either manage to survive and reproduce against what Mother Nature and Lady Luck have in store for them, or they don't.
No intelligence needed for such a fitness test, Southack.
Whether you are talking about the intelligently-derived dictionary for the monkeys
Invalid analogy, evolution does not proceed by "checking a dictionary" or any other reference material.
or whether you are talking about a "process" that can determine which DNA guesses are worth building upon (as opposed to never trying again),
Oh, puh-LEAZE. This is the sort of "missing the point" stuff that demonstrates that you don't even understand the basics of the theory of evolution well enough to describe it properly, MUCH LESS understand it well enough to point out any flaws it may have.
Evolution is *NOT* about "determining which DNA guesses are worth building on". I don't know what you're trying to talk about here, but it ain't evolution. If *this* is your skewed understanding of evolution, then it's no surprise that it looks unbelievable to you. But you're engaging (perhaps unintentionally) in a Straw Man fallacy here.
What evolution actually consists of is not that it ever determines what's "worth building on", it that it ends up doing "trial and error" building on whatever already happens to be in the DNA. That's a *far* different thing than your version.
And the "trials" (mutations and recombinations) are undirected ("random" if you will) but the "errors" are statistically weeded out by the "school of hard knocks".
Over time (and generations), the lucky improvements persist and propagate, the mistakes die off. Over enough time, improvements have piled upon improvements to the point where large cumulative changes have resulted.
you are getting AWAY from the pure mathematical odds of random chance
This half you have exactly right -- this is why your original post was in error, it counts *ONLY the "pure mathematical odds of random chance".
due to the intelligence in such "fitness check" processes.
*EERRNNTT*. Thanks for playing.
Of course, that's the whole point of the math for this thread: to demonstrate that something MORE than mere random chance must be in play, that a "fitness check" or other form of intelligent intervention is REQUIRED.
You're *close*, but you keep crashing to the ground with the "intelligent intervention" presumption.
It takes no intelligence whatsoever for a slower mosquito to be eaten more often by a dragonfly than the faster mosquito. It takes no intelligence for the hawk with better eyesight to prosper more than the hawk without.
Natural selection happens just fine naturally.
Re-read the math in the article. It's all there. Left unsaid is only what the math means.
You're right in that it (trivially) demonstrates that things don't happen "purely randomly". But it's a huge mistake to leap from that obvious observation to "it was designed, I tell you!!"
Perhaps, but even if natural selection does actually occur in the wild, it still fails to explain evolution.
Natural selection merely culls an existing species or allows an existing species to prosper/multiply.
Natural selection per se adds no mutations to DNA nor does it create distinct new DNA from whole cloth; instead, natural selection only applies to existing species as they stand, leaving science to still answer the question as to the origin of those species.
That's fine, but you've missed the point.
The poster was claiming that the creation of the first valid, useful DNA strand could be explained by an intelligent "fitness" process, not that there were fitness processes in existence which did not require intelligence.