https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/random.html
Evo-phobes frequently straw-man the process of evolution as being "random".
Straw-manning is an intellectually dishonest tactic of trying to misrepresent an idea in order to try and persuade you that it is unworkable. Nonsense. Wrong.
But of course, evolution is not just "random", although there is an element of randomness in it.
It had long been recognised that the forms of living creatures could change over time.
This is the FACT of evolution.
But for a long time, people had no coherent idea how and why they changed.
We lacked a THEORY of evolution.
It wasn't until Wallace and Darwin came up with their conception that things began to make sense.
To put it in a nutshell, it was the idea of the differential selection of heritable characteristics.
Variation was random, but the variants that succeeded in getting reproduced more got - reproduced more!
Those variations that were successful were most definitely not random.
It was an idea that prompted Huxley, Darwin's friend, to declare, "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!"
It is remarkable that this basic insight led to genetics and the discovery of DNA, unknown at the time.
Afternote: Their lack of understanding of a mechanism of inheritance led them to a puzzle that they had no answer to, known as the problem of "blending inheritance", whereby all variation could be lost, generation by generation. I go into this on my page, https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/a-problem-for-darwin.html
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