I’m puzzled by this post by Clayton Cramer, who thinks:

I am prepared to believe (at least for sake of argument) that all of these complex mechanisms could have developed as a result of blind, random chance. But what are the chances that all of these complex mechanisms managed to develop in less than 700 million years? More importantly, what are the chances that cells that blindly, randomly developed one of these structures or enzymes were the ancestors of cells that blindly, randomly developed all the rest of these useful mutations?

On my planet, 700 million years is a really long time. Is there some kind of mathematical analysis that he’s done to indicate that it’s for some reason insufficient?

I think that part of the problem is his continued use of variations of the phrase “blind, random chance.” This is a common misperception among evolution skeptics (who have apparently never read “The Blind Watchmaker” or other books that describe how evolution actually works). They seem to think that it stumbles around blindly, as though it were like the million monkeys randomly typing Shakespeare attempts. In fact it is directed–it simply isn’t directed by intelligence. It’s directed by what works. If a mutation occurs that has an advantage in the environment, it is preserved, and the next generation builds on it.

Imagine the monkeys, except when one of them accidentally gets a letter of the sonnet right, they don’t have to type that part any more–it’s preserved in their next attempt, and they just bang on the keys to fill in the spaces around it. Each time they get one right, it becomes more sonnet like. If the sonnet has, say a couple thousand characters, then the monkey might get each one right within a few dozen keystrokes (assuming that he’s really typing randomly, and not skipping some keys entirely–which is an interesting analog to the concept of future development paths limited by existing morphology, described in Gould’s book The Panda’s Thumb). Even with thousands of characters, a rapidly typing simian would pound out the poem in a couple days, while having no knowledge of what he’s doing.