LOL - this thread is still going, is it? Well, I tell you what - why not skim through the next 450+ posts, as I think that this article has been rather convincingly wrecked by the sum total of those. If, after that, you still find my post to be fatuous, you can post back and tell me which part you object to. In the mean time...
Think about it this way. Could the authoritative text of Hamlet (assume that this phrase has a referent) have arisen by a evolutionary process from an ur-Hamlet text as discerning theater audiences chose between random variant texts? So, in one version, Hamlet soliloquizes "To be or not to BRIE," but that loses out in popularity to "To be or not to BE," and so on, as theater audiences painstakingly improve the text word by word.
That strikes me as a very good way to think of it, actually. The improvments that are approved of are kept for the next round, and those that are less popular are discarded, until you get to the final product.
Isn't this story ridiculous?
It is only an analogy intended to illustrate the principle. And the principle is sound, even if the particulars of this analogy seem rather silly ;)
Well, my good humored General, consider the following. If we continue with the Hamlet analogy, we would have to believe that every "move" from the ur-Hamlet text to the authoritative text is "better" in some sense. So, we have to come up first with a sequence of textual changes each of which results in an intelligible text, and each of which is somehow "better" ("fitter"?) than the last. There is a well-known word game in which the challenge is to start with one word and by single letter changes move toward another word by stages, each stage being a meaningful word. It's hard--try turning "good" into "evil" using one-letter changes. What's hard is the constraint that each intermediate word be a real word and not nonsense. So, imagine the ur-Hamlet--and someone randomly changes a letter. How many of the possible altered texts is intelligible? Perhaps a few. How many would be considered "better" than the original? And how could you construct a path from the ur-Hamlet to Shakespeare's Hamlet? Daunting odds--a literary text's merits depend on the gestalt of the text--there may be sensible textual emendations on a small scale, but it is highly improbable that literary merit can be achieved by singular random changes--even if you have millions of years to fool around. Yet this is what the evolutionists would have us believe. I don't believe in a 6,000 year Earth, and am inclined to believe that variation is life forms is due to changed DNA. But as to why the DNA changed--here I part company with you. "Natural selection" has not been proved in my view, and frankly I doubt it could be proved.