"How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!"

https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/2025/08/how-extremely-stupid-not-to-have.html

Thomas Henry Huxley

Creationists often mischaracterize evolution as being "purely random", "pure chance" or "accident", neglecting the effect of the natural selection of heritable variations.

This is a straw-man argument, and if knowingly made, an intellectually dishonest one. It is criticizing not a real position, but a distorted caricature of it for rhetorical, if ineffectual and unearned, brownie points.

At the time of writing, the idea of the natural selection of heritable variations has only been around for some 166 years, published in Darwin's "Origin" in 1859, so creationists may not have had enough time to catch up yet.

Huxley, Darwin's friend, put it thus: "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!"

These creationist arguments get made in two contexts, to wit, 1) the origin of life and 2) its evolution. They often get muddled together, but I will deal with them separately. However, the thing they do have in common is that they are both examples of the well-recognized fallacy of the "argument from personal incredulity", or, less charitably, the argument from ignorance. It takes the form of, "I can't understand how this could have happened, or how this could be, therefore it cannot be right." See https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/personal-incredulity.

I'll deal with 2) first: Evolution.

Yes, mutations (changes to the genome) do happen largely randomly. We say that they are undirected towards any end result or purpose. Experiments and observations prove this and reveal that the majority of mutations are neutral concerning reproductive fitness (the likelihood of them being replicated in subsequent generations).

Neutral mutations

As neutral mutations build up in a population, it becomes more diverse and able to respond to environmental changes, becoming either deleterious (disadvantageous) or advantageous, Remember the fitness of any feature is always fitness with respect to the given environment. 

Disadvantageous or deleterious mutations

These are the next most frequently occurring mutations. As the words indicate, they impose a disadvantage in the reproduction stakes, and if they are not immediately fatal or incapacitating, will still tend to be - um - deleted from the gene pool eventually.

Finally, come the comparatively rare advantageous mutations.

"Advantageous" means giving an advantage in the reproduction states, so advantageous mutations are more likely, if they are heritable, to become more and more frequently represented in passing generations. Creationists like to talk about "information" in the genome, without defining it or saying how it can be quantified, but reproductive fitness can easily be defined and quantified, and has the added advantage of being relevant to evolutionary theory.

We see many creationist 'memes' bleating that sandcastles or robots or clock components or whatever do not evolve, as if this calls into question the possibility of evolution doing anything interesting, but what all these examples omit is the fact that these things do not change by the selection of undirected heritable variations. Sorry to belabour the point, but it is absolutely vital.

1), The origin of life, or abiogenesis. See https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/magic.html