But a functional adaptation coming out of nowhere?
Adaptation in the evolutionary sense comes from genetic variation acted upon by natural selection. Given that the genomes of offspring vary from that of their parents and siblings, and given the scarcity of resources available to individuals including fertile mates and the need to compete for them, biological evolution is inevitable, as well as a type of arms race in nature favoring those with the most useful talents for surviving and reproducing such as flying, smelling food, or camouflaging oneself
I mean if life never existed and couldnt even get off the ground with one function, let alone build on that function with more function, that would be more reasonable to expect from a mindless process to me.
Life is probably inevitable wherever it is possible (abiogenesis, or chemical evolution), with complexity following thereafter from biological evolution.
There is some very interesting work being done by a Jeremy England at MIT that takes of where Prigogine ended in the discussion of dissipative structures and far-from-equilibrium states. It's a new way of conceiving of life, and suggests that its existence, far from being an unlikely stroke of luck, is probably inevitable wherever it is possible.
Dissipative structures include such things as eddies (vortices) in streams, tornadoes, and hurricanes. These structures organize to dissipate energy more efficiently, kinetic energy in the case of vortices, and ambient heat energy in the case of toradoes and hurricanes, which is why they are commoner in the summer, nearer the equator, and are becoming more frequennt and extreme as the earth is warming.
This concept of organized dissipative structures forming to dissipate energy was the brainstorm of Belgian Nobelist Ilya Prigogine, author of "Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature." His work was extended to biological systems by Jeremy England. From
A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life | Quanta Magazine :
Why does life exist? Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and "should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill."
From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at MIT, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity.
The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
Incidentally, the giant red spot of Jupiter is thought to be such a dissipative structure, a huge, centuries old cyclone of sorts which structure is created and preserved by planetary heat below.
So, rather than saying that it all seems too coincidental, we need to understand how nature actually works, and that nature can assemble structural complexity from simplicity. A simpler example would be the way that planets all organize as oblate spheroids due to gravity. Without that concept, one is left wonder how fragments of rock could somehow all impact one another to form that specific shape, and call it statistically impossible when in fact, any other outcome is essentially impossible.. One might imagine an intelligence directing the assembly of the planet.
