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But every generation, including all intermediate generations, must survive until reproduction takes place. That means that each generation must have a working body that can cope with its environment. So why isn't the analog to this in the literary model some notion of making sense?

Because we're already assuming from the beginning that survival is a matter of fitness, right? Fitter creatures will tend to survive and flourish better than less fit creatures. And here, we've defined fitness as the distance from the original text. So, it then follows that as creatures become more fit from generation to generation, their survival becomes more likely from generation to generation. If our original random starting string "survived" long enough to produce some superior offspring, there's no reason to believe that those superior offspring won't also survive - after all, they're more fit than the parent was.

I hope this is not too opaque - what I want to get at is that, in this example, "survival" and "fitness" travel hand in hand already. In effect, they are two sides of the same coin - if descendants are more fit than their ancestors, then by definition, they are more likely to survive than their ancestors. Once you define "fitness", you've effectively taken care of "survival" as well. That's why I don't see the necessity of inserting further restrictions about making sense.

As for a general intelligence have superior survival value--nah, not necessarily. Some of the most successful life forms (bacteria) have little intelligence.

Oh, it's not the only way, to be sure. There are archaebacteria that are essentially unchanged in billions of years. But I can't help but look around me and think that a certain large-brained species has been remarkably successful ;)

I'm not making headway on the literary metaphor--which is a good metaphor, but you are resisting my argument. Let's start over with a new metaphor--software programs. Could Windows XP have evolved from DOS through an evolutionary process, in which success is measured by consumer acceptance of some sort? Imagine starting with DOS, and then "mutating" the program by shooting X-rays through the memory on which the DOS program resides. Most of the mutated programs will not work, but a few might. It is even possible that a few will be superior (from the consumer's point of view) than the original. But even assuming millions of mutations a generation, and millions of years to mess around, is it really believable that there is a path from DOS to Windows XP--DOS1, DOS2, DOS3....to DOSN, where DOSN is Windows XP? Anyone who has written software knows that incremental changes to a program almost always crash it--new features require more than a few bit flips. And if you implement half of the incremental changes, you don't have half a new feature--you have gibberish. Many SIMULTANEOUS changes have to made to DOS1 to get to DOS2, and the odds that all those changes get effected by X-ray bit flips is vanishingly small, or zero for all practical purposes. The evolutionists have a "photomorph" understanding of somatic change. What I mean by that is the parlor trick of starting with a photo of say Hitler and making it morph into a photo of say Joan of Arc using software. Could land-based four-legged ur-whales photomorph into whales? That requires drastic somatic change--and if you implement half of them, or 1% of them, you don't have a working living being, you have a stillborn. Put another way, DNA is not analog, but rather digital. Let's pick up human intelligence, which somehow got into your/our posts. So far as we can tell, there is not a photomorph increase in human intelligence--our ancestors of 200,000 years ago are thought to have the same brains as us, and therefore the same raw intelligence as us. What the heck did they need that potential brainpower for? How was that intelligence "evolved" by the exigencies of the environment? Put another way, why did 1%, or .01%, of cavemen have the potential for understanding number theory?