Frozen Evolution. Or, that’s not the way it is, Mr. Darwin. A Farewell to Selfish Gene.

Statistical reasons for the impossibility of the formation of an organism would be valid only for a single-step emergence. However, the theory of natural selection assumes the gradual, multi-step formation of living systems. The differences can best be illustrated using the well-known thought experiment (Fig. XXVII.1). If we sit a troop of apes down to typewriters and teach them to press the keys, there is only a negligible probability that any of them would write a sensible sentence within a reasonable period of time by only randomly pressing the keys, for example a sentence such as “Taken statistically, it is impossible that something as complicated as an organism could be formed by a random process of evolution.”. If, however, we have each ape press only one key, then send him back to the trees, we can find which of them wrote the letter “T”, copy this onto papers which we put in all the typewriters and request the apes to hit another key, etc. this sentence will be written with surprising speed. Darwin’s the theory of evolution assumes that random processes play an important role in the development of life, but not a decisive role. In the process of mutagenesis, random processes only generate the individual changes, from which the process of natural selection then non-randomly chooses those variants that improve the functioning of the whole system.