How They Avoid Plainly Describing Darwin's Theory of Insanely Lucky Luck

Darwin's theory of biological origins was always a theory of insanely lucky luck; and the more we learn about how gigantically organized and immensely fine-tuned and vastly information-rich biological organisms are, requiring so many interdependent components, the more insanely lucky such luck seems. In his book The Origin of Species, Darwin was careful to never use the word "lucky" or "luck," to prevent people from realizing that his theory was based on assumptions that ocean-sized levels of luck had occurred everywhere. But on page 144 he let down his guard a bit, saying, "Natural selection can do nothing until favourable variations chance to occur," a sentence that means "natural selection can do nothing until  lucky variations luckily occur." 

In The Origin of Species Darwin preferred to use the term "favorable variations" which appears spelled as "favourable variations" in the text. Nine different times in the book he appealed to the possibility of "favourable variations," and six times in the book he referred to "profitable variations." He also used these equivalent phrases:

• "variations manifestly useful"
• "useful variations"
• "some variations useful"
• "variations useful in some way"   
• "variations, which are in any manner profitable"
• "variations useful to man"
• "variations in some advantageous"

In general such appeals amounted to appeals to miracles of luck. To the type of readers he was appealing to, references to "favorable variations" or "profitable variations" sounded less objectionable than a candid phrase such as "miracle of luck." The "favorable variations" or "profitable variations"  being referred to were imagined lucky accidents in which some member of a species would accidentally get some inheritable and useful new feature or structure that members of that species did not previously have, in some bonanza of luck. 

You wouldn't get such luck in a quadrillion years

If you're selling Darwin's theory, you don't want to give away that it's an explanation all centered around oceans and oceans of the luckiest luck. So folks use two techniques to avoid making such a confession: use of the misleading phrase "natural selection" and the use of the "defined in many ways" word "evolution." 

"Natural selection" was always a misleading term to describe the Darwinian theory of origins. "Selection" is a term meaning a choice by a conscious agent; but Darwin postulated no such thing when he tried to explain biological origins. Darwin at times confessed how he used misleading language by using the term "natural selection."  In a letter to Charles Lyell dated June 6, 1860.Darwin said, "I suppose  'natural selection' was a bad term ; but to change it now, I think, would make confusion worse confounded." Similarly, in the 1869 version of The Origin of Species, Darwin confessed that "in the literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term." Besides making a deceptive use of the term "selection," the phrase "natural selection" had a misleading effect by covering up the real essence of Darwin's theory, which is not selection but luck by means of chance variations. 

The term "evolution" is not by itself a deceptive term. But the term has been used in very deceptive ways, by a trick of equivocation. The problem is that "evolution" is a vague word that can be defined in many different ways. Darwinists use the word "evolution" in extremely varied ways, at some times using the word as if it meant the indisputable fact of mere gene pool variation or some other little thing, and at other times using the word "evolution" as if it meant something a million times bigger, such as the claim that ancient biology innovations all have accidental causes, or the claim that all life on Earth descends from a common ancestor, with the transitions occurring only because of natural reasons. There have been innumerable Darwinist writers employing some sleazy equivocation trickery by writing a paragraph like this:

"One of the definitions of evolution is 'gene pool change over time.'  Evolution like this is simply a fact. By comparing DNA from very old corpses and the DNA of modern humans, scientists know that the DNA of today's humans is not exactly the same as the DNA of humans living 5,000 years ago. So we know evolution is fact. All life on Earth has a common ancestor, and the transitions from each level of complexity to another has occurred only by blind natural processes such as natural selection. That's a fact." 

A writer producing this paragraph has engaged in equivocation trickery as shameless as someone who first gets you to confess that Taylor Swift is a star, and who then says, "I'm glad you agree that Taylor Swift is a giant ball of luminous hydrogen and helium."  The writer started out by offering a minimalist definition of "evolution," defining it as mere "gene pool change over time." Then, without announcing how he was doing a definition switch, the writer has switched to a vastly more presumptuous definition of "evolution," one that is not fact but a dubious metaphysical theory. 

Neither the term "natural selection" nor the term "evolution" correctly and explicitly describes the essence of Darwinian causal explanations. By using such terms, Darwinists have avoided plainly stating the basic idea behind their theory.  How can we plainly state that idea?

Suppose you asked a Darwinist to very plainly state the main idea behind Darwinism without using not-literally-accurate phrases such as "natural selection" or "mean many different things" words such as "evolution." He might say something like "the preservation and proliferation of fortuitous random mutations."  Under Darwinian theory, something like this is happening repeatedly:

(1) A natural variation causes a bit of luck in one organism, a bit of luck increasing the chance of the organism surviving and reproducing.

(2) Because this bit of luck increases the chance of the organism surviving or reproducing, the bit of luck tends to spread around in the population of organisms of a particular species. 

(3)Thereby the bit of luck is preserved, and proliferates. 

But while it is a good explanation of the idea at the core of Darwinism, the phrase "the preservation and proliferation of fortuitous random mutations" is too polysyllabic to qualify as an example of someone "plainly stating" something.  We can do a much better job of plain speaking by making these changes:

(1) We can replace the four-syllable word "preservation" with the equivalent two syllable word "saving."

(2) We can replace the five syllable word "proliferation" with the equivalent two-syllable word "spreading." 

(3) We can replace the rarely used and poorly understood word "fortuitous" with a word everyone understands: "lucky." 

(4) We can replace the two-word term "random mutations" with the single word "variations."

Now we are left with a very good plain English phrase with the smallest number of words and syllables, one that states the essence of Darwinist explanations. The phrase is: "the saving and spreading of lucky variations."  Everyone can understand such a phrase. 

But you will very rarely hear Darwinists use so plain and clear a phrase. The reason is partially that they do not want people to understand how Darwinism all hinges upon appeals to endless mountains of luck. Once people know you are appealing to countless tons of luck, then people will start asking things such as "was it too much luck to ever have occurred?" And that's the last thing Darwinists want you to be asking.  

The more people study how gigantically organized and immensely fine-tuned and vastly information-rich biological organisms are,  and how much they depend on systems of interdependent components, the more they will tend to answer such a question by saying, "yes, it was too much luck to have ever occurred by chance."  And the more people study how DNA does not actually specify the anatomy of organisms or the structure of cells, the more people will realize that there is no conceivable DNA variation luck that can explain how we got humans or mammals, which do not have their anatomical or cellular structure specified in DNA. 

Once a person starts seriously studying the math behind claims of accidental construction, he will rather quickly discover a principle that blows up the credibility of Darwinist explanations into smithereens: the principle that whenever there is a type of token that can have twenty or more values, a simple linear increase in the length of a sequence of such tokens  causes the number of possible combinations to skyrocket in a geometric and exponential fashion, in what is called a combinatorial explosion. It's the reason why security experts tell you to have financial account passwords of at least 14 random characters. This combinatorial explosion principle means that the chance of you getting any decent length of functional instructions by random variations is negligible, for all practical purposes zero. The reality is that random variations cannot ever produce decent lengths of functional purposeful information such as instructions on how to make a complex folded fine-tuned protein molecule with hundreds or thousands of amino acids that have to be arranged just right for the molecule to work. 

You can use a programming language to fairly easily perform the rather elementary programming task of creating a program that continuously generates random characters or letters, at a rate of maybe 100 characters per second.  But if you do that task as a youth, and keep that program running all your life, there will not be 1 chance in 1,000,000,000,000,000 that the program will ever create a well-spelled grammatical functional paragraph of 100 words or more. The reasons why that won't ever happen (and the reasons why unguided effects cannot produce very complex biology innovations) are pretty much the same reasons why ink splashes never produce decent lengths of readable text.