On the one hand consider a bird and a smart plane. Throw The Bird skyward and say, "Bird, fly to area A". Then throw The Smart Plane skyward and say, "Smart Plane, Fly to area B".
On the other hand consider finding a bird-shaped stone and a plane-shaped stone that you per chance came across when you stubbed your toe on them. Now, in the same way, command The Stoned Bird, "Fly to area A", and Command The Stoned Plane "Fly to area B".
Almost a 100% of the time The Bird and The Smart Plane will reach their designated targets. How is it that The Bird can overcome gravity, wind etc and reach its goal? The Smart Plane has built-in GPS that switches on and guides The Plane to "B". Seasonal changes in The Bird's environment switches on its GPS and guides it to "A"
It is not hard to guess why The Stones miss their designated targets 99.99% of the time. The Smart Plane can overcome obstacles and vicissitudes to reach its goal as its GPS gives it self-control over how it "falls". There is a great deal of confidence that The Bird will succeed. The chances that the Stoned Bird will reach destination "A" is slim to none. The Smart Plane is flying heads up with GPS sight. The Bird-shaped Stone flies blindly. When you toss The Stones across the park they are strictly under environmental influences that they have no power to resist; The Stoned Plane is twisted and flung, and so bounces around here, there and hither. The Stoned Bird just "flies" uncontrollably.
The similarities between The Bird and The Smart Plane are quite obvious but it is not always clear what makes them different. The Smart Plane's GPS has "Designed by The Man" written all over it. The Man could not have programmed The Bird. During the millions of years when The Bird was developing its GPS, the ancestors of The Man were mouse-sized rodents living in the shadow of The Dinosaur. True: a Stoned Bird and a Stoned Plane could have been around billions of years before The Bird and The Smart Plane took to soaring the skies in controlled flight. Maybe some lucky stone had a little GPS embedded in it. However, The Bird-shaped Stone with this tiny bit of GPS cannot make copies of itself and multiply. The Stoned Bird will eventually crumble under the blind forces of nature, causing the accidentally acquired bit of GPS in it to disappear. An individual bird will eventually die, but, because it can multiply, the little bit of accidental GPS it acquired is preserved in its copies. Over thousands of generations these copy/offsprings can accumulate improved GPS. Unlike The Stones, The Bird was not shaped solely by chance. Evolution by Natural Selection relentlessly weeds out the less fit and the unfit GPS birds, and keeps on improving the most successful ones. The Stones can only "fly back" to Earth when flung into the air, and exactly where in the world they happen to land is anybody's guess.
The similarities between The Bird and The Smart Plane are quite obvious but it is not always clear what makes them different. The Smart Plane's GPS has "Designed by The Man" written all over it. The Man could not have programmed The Bird. During the millions of years when The Bird was developing its GPS, the ancestors of The Man were mouse-sized rodents living in the shadow of The Dinosaur. True: a Stoned Bird and a Stoned Plane could have been around billions of years before The Bird and The Smart Plane took to soaring the skies in controlled flight. Maybe some lucky stone had a little GPS embedded in it. However, The Bird-shaped Stone with this tiny bit of GPS cannot make copies of itself and multiply. The Stoned Bird will eventually crumble under the blind forces of nature, causing the accidentally acquired bit of GPS in it to disappear. An individual bird will eventually die, but, because it can multiply, the little bit of accidental GPS it acquired is preserved in its copies. Over thousands of generations these copy/offsprings can accumulate improved GPS. Unlike The Stones, The Bird was not shaped solely by chance. Evolution by Natural Selection relentlessly weeds out the less fit and the unfit GPS birds, and keeps on improving the most successful ones. The Stones can only "fly back" to Earth when flung into the air, and exactly where in the world they happen to land is anybody's guess.
The Bird did not always have GPS. How did it come to have GPS? Eons of time ago, within a bird population, one bird (let us call her Big Bird)just accidentally discovered a bit of GPS. Big Bird became more successful than the others, who had none. Its offspring, Little Bird, inherited its qualities. Little Bird's daughter, Grand Bird, had a bit more. It allowed Grand Bird to fly straighter, to have a greater range of access to more mates, food and breeding space. A non-Big Bird descendant, lacking the advantages of GPS, left less and less offsprings within the population. After many generations the population had mostly GPS equipped Big Bird descendants.
The Smart Plane did not always have GPS. How did it come to have GPS? Geeky Girl designed a simple GPS app for JetBlue. JetBlue is now able to fly its passengers more quickly and safely to any desired locale, as compared to the non-GPS, Air Iguana. Smart Geeky Girl, GG's Daughter, designed a better version for Air Spirit. Caribbean Geeky Girl, GG's granddaughter, made a much better GPS app for Air Jamaica. More and more airlines competed. The jets with the better and best GPS out-competed the poorer and non-GPS ones.
The Smart Plane's detail specs were written and assembled by The Man. The Stones' superficial plane-and-bird likenesses were accidentally molded by random blind forces. Bird GPS was perfected by thousands of bird generations slowly accumulating chance improvements. And thousands of man-hours of preplanned design work went into advancing the perfection of The Smart Plane's improved GPS.
To reiterate, human culture accumulates planned improvements. Fathers and mothers teach it to the next generation. The following generations add to the store of knowledge and teach it to their kids. Much more slowly, bird "culture" (bird DNA, heredity) accumulates, stores and passes down GPS chance improvements genetically from one bird generation to the next. For each lucky genetic improvement chanced upon, there are hundreds of thousands of poorly serving "GPS gene" modifications that are rejected. Countless many mutant genes are tested by Natural Selection but only a scant rare few are not weeded out. These lucky discoveries of genetic gems accumulated slowly. Improvements are added by bird descendants stretching through epochs of time to the present. Tens of thousands of bird generations record these tidbits of "GPS" information within DNA heredity, thus passing on the cumulative stores to future generations.
So, the difference between the Smart Plane and The Bird is that one is designed and assembled by The Man and the other is self-designed and self-assembled by the bird's DNA. Another difference is that it took The Man about 50 years to perfect GPS, but it took The Bird's DNA millions of years. Once upon a time billions of years ago, by some quirk of chance (true story, no kidding), a certain type of stone got the ability to generate copies of itself. From that time forward that particular stone was known as The Replicator. It replicated copies of itself, and those copies replicated more copies of themselves. As time passed (millions and millions of years of time) The Replicator transformed and evolved into The RNA Replicator. The RNA Replicator transformed and evolved into The DNA Replicator. The DNA Replicator transformed and evolved into The Animal. The Animal transformed and evolved into The Bird and The Man. The Bird evolved built-in GPS first and The Man had no evolved built-in GPS at all. However, during those millions of years The Man had evolved The Intelligence and was able to design The Smart Plane with better built-in GPS (in which he flew to Paris faster than The Bird :).
The mode applied by The Smart Plane is The Man-designed preplanned assembly of various appropriate "Silicon Valley Stones". The mode employed by The Bird is self-assembly through Natural Selection of various appropriate "DNA Genetic Stones". Of all the tens of millions of different types of molecular "stones", only five kinds have the ability to naturally store information that leads to the evolution of The Dinosaur into The Bird and "The Mouse into The Man". These are the "genetic stones" guanine, cytosine, adenine thymine and uracil(G, C, A, T, U).
Let’s look at a population of dice: marks on their six sides:
A, B, C, D, E, F. Let’s call it the REDdie variant. The chance of throwing an F is 1 in 6, or 16%.
The chance of throwing a Z is zero
An E on an unlucky (or lucky) die may accidentally change into (mutate into) an F.
Marks on this die: A, B, C, D, F, F. Lets call this variant REDDERdie).The chance of throwing an F is doubled:2 in 6, or 33%.
The chance of throwing a 2.02Z is zero.
A B as well as an E might accidentally mutate in an individual copy of REDdie. Marks on die: A, F, C, D, F, F. Here we have variant REDDeepDIE. The chance of throwing an F is increased to 3 chances in 6, or a 50% chance.
The chance of throwing a 13.02Z is zero.
The above is all purely accidental, chance, luck, "miracles", acts of pure randomness. Evolution by pure chance is pure. . . well. . . nonsense!
Yes. Chance does play an important role in evolution. If this is a breeding population of dice the above has it that the die species started out with a population of 100% REDdie. Purely and spontaneously, by accident, a REDdie individual mutates into REDDERdie. Out of the blue, a cosmic ray slams into an individual of the original REDdie causing it to mutate into REDDeepDIE.
Among the three variants within the dice population, REDDeepDIE by chance acquire the ability to have offsprings fastest, with REDdie dice, the original, slowest. What may happen after some time is that the population of dice will consist of a majority REDDeepDIE and a smaller and smaller minority of REDdie. However, if the environment is such that REDDERdie makes the best fit it may thrive with greatest success and may out-compete the other two, even though it is not as fecund. If the environment has a selective bias for one variant, chance matters less and less to its survival as compared to those that are the least adaptable. Natural Selection can be viewed as a series of many sieves, one under the other. If REDDeepDIE or REDDERdie variant descendants consistently passes through them, that particular variant is not simply being lucky. Somewhere along the line one of its ancestors most surely acquired the adaptive ability by chance random mutation. But it is now nonrandomly being given a free pass through the sieves of Natural Selection because it has the best fit to the environment.
The variants of this breeding population REDdie, REDDERdie and REDDdeepDie have heritable qualities as well as non-heritable qualities. Only heritable qualities maybe nonrandomly preserved and consistently passed on down the generations. And only heritable qualities may nonrandomly be weeded out of future generations consistently.
What does it mean to say "The chance of throwing a. . .Z is zero"? One, two, three or more individuals within the die species might all wear the same fad badge (Z) of identity regardless of belonging to different variants. However, only the heritable qualities of REDdie, REDDERdie and REDDdeepDie maybe consistently passed on by Natural Selection and improved or not improved by descendants. The expression is implying that, though the quality, Z, maybe accidentally acquired by various individuals within the die population, it is not of heritable quality; it is therefore not subject to Natural Selection. Only heritable traits are acted upon by Natural Selection's series of sifters. Passing fads like Z come and go at random because passing fads like Z do not affect survival within a given environmental niche.
If A, B, C, D, E, F qualities are the only ones that can be "thrown” (that is, the only heritable ones) then 2.02Z or 13.02Z (by definition of not being heritable qualities) cannot be "thrown". Sure, all of the above qualities/traits (A to Z) are randomly changeable due to "the throwing of the dice" by blind unpredictable influences. The point about evolution is that the Natural Selection sieves are indifferent to changes in nonheritable traits, Z's. On the other hand, changes in the heritable traits (A, B, C, D, E, F) of living organic populations may nonrandomly affect the species survival fitness within their niches.
If A, B, C, D, E, F qualities are the only ones that can be "thrown” (that is, the only heritable ones) then 2.02Z or 13.02Z (by definition of not being heritable qualities) cannot be "thrown". Sure, all of the above qualities/traits (A to Z) are randomly changeable due to "the throwing of the dice" by blind unpredictable influences. The point about evolution is that the Natural Selection sieves are indifferent to changes in nonheritable traits, Z's. On the other hand, changes in the heritable traits (A, B, C, D, E, F) of living organic populations may nonrandomly affect the species survival fitness within their niches.
Let’s move from A, B, C, D, E, F and Z to genes. Nucleic acid bodies (for example, the cache of genes/DNA within the human genome) store the information for growing amino acid bodies(for example, the cache of proteins/enzymes called a human being). The latter's design specifications are stored in the former. Random mutations in DNA may alter protein expression for better or for worse for the experience of an individual of a species. A mutant gene allele that leaves the protein body it affects more adaptable in its environs than previous, may, at the expense of its other competing alleles, increase its frequency in the species gene pool (compare the frequency of the brown eye gene to the blue eye version/allele). If a protein mutates as a result of direct damage there is no consequence to the species DNA. On the other hand, direct damage/mutation of an individual gene may have widespread species consequences. For example, if Lindsey trashes her Optima, it is inconsequential to the future success of The KIA Optima. However, if the original KIA Optima blue prints are heavily damaged with the loss of some key specification information, this could prove to have grave widespread consequences in the manufacture of future Optimas.
Evolution will not occur solely by chance. A species evolutionary progress demands a combination of chance and selection. Random/chance gene mutations are necessary because it continually generates a wide variety of heritable DNA raw material within a species gene pool. But nonrandom/discriminating Natural Selection is the final arbiter because it chooses what gene raw materials will advance the improvement of the organisms' fitness to their environments.
