Why isn’t evolution completely impossible?

Question from Abdul:
How can a undirected process create DNA that is way more complex than Microsoft or a quantum computer?

Simplicity cannot create complexity.

I don’t get Darwinian evolution, can you guys please help me out.

Answer by SmartLX:
Abdul, I thank you for correctly referring to evolution as an undirected process. Many who challenge it make a point of calling it a random process, which it certainly is not.

Complexity can indeed emerge from simplicity. The laws of the universe allow order and information to increase in a given area, usually with the help of an influx of energy. Otherwise there would be no increases in complexity at all, even with intelligent assistance; buildings could not be erected, coherent thoughts could not be assembled and ink could not be arranged to form words. Practically nothing we do would be possible, and physics wouldn’t be able to explain anything at all.

If an increase in order and complexity is physically possible, then how does it happen without guidance? It can definitely happen by chance, such as when the letters in alphabet soup float into the order of a word or a name, but just as often it happens by deterministic physical mechanisms doing their own thing. Evolution gets its raw material from mutations, which can duplicate genes in a sequence or recombine them in many different ways.

Once the mutations have happened, some life forms have the mutation and some don’t. If the mutation has any effect, positive or negative, on the likelihood that a life form will survive and procreate, then over multiple generations the proportions of the population with and without the mutation will change. Over thousands of generations, mutations upon mutations can have profound effects on the nature of the life forms. Life has had about 3 billion years to compound this effect and produce the immense biological diversity we see today.

If there really were a saying as simple as “simplicity cannot create complexity” that immediately disproved Darwin’s theory of evolution, it would not have survived for 150 years. Most scientists barely have the resources to do their own research, let alone sustain a massive worldwide conspiracy to pretend that a bogus theory is valid. Why would they do that anyway? It’s a terrible way to promote atheism, for example, because many scientists are still religious and many religious people accept evolution. No, the theory has survived as a scientific theory because it has enormous explanatory power, requires very few assumptions and is backed by a mountain of evidence.