yeah i do need to buy into it because it claims to have produced me, and i have intellegent thought, and i need to know how it produced intellegent thought, and just randomly producing it doesnt cut it. theres also the origin of life thing too.
There you go - as I said, the feeling you need to "buy into" something implausible is a pretty clear sign you are thinking of a misrepresentation of the theory and not the theory itself. As Auto pointed out, evolution is
not random, and it says nothing at all about the origins of life - only what happened
after life emerged.
To clarify the confusing issue of "randomness", two of the inputs that cause adaptation are 1) natural selection and 2) genetic mutation. The latter is
somewhat random (though still limited by sexual selection and the laws of chemistry), the former is not at all random.
Which is not to say it is
planned, or
designed. "Random" and "planned" aren't the only two options. Take a beehive - there is no individual bee or god of bees directing each individual worker to construct according to a detailed blueprint of a beehive - they build the way they do spontaneously, without direction, because bees can't help but behave in harmony with their innate "bee-ness". Nevertheless, their bee-havior changes over time. This is not because (for example) they look around and go "Hey, guys, we should build our hives higher up so the bears don't get us!" or because the bee god communicates this to them through a burning honeysuckle or inscribes it on a rock. It's simply because the bears destroy the low-hung beehives, which robs the low-hangers of the opportunity to reproduce and pass on their innate behavior to another generation.
