[TeMPOraL]

Evolution is a dumb, greedy search that can only work in extremely tiny increments, and every step has to result in a viable organism that's also at least as fit as it was before.

That means whatever evolution created, whether it's wings or brains, however complex it looks now, must be fundamentally simple enough it could be reached by iterating in tiny steps that were useful in isolation. It constrains the space of designs reachable by evolution considerably.

[slashdave]

> every step has to result in a viable organism that's also at least as fit as it was before.

Not true. Learn some genomics before trying to explain evolution.

[TeMPOraL]

I did. Sure, I'm glossing over some detail - in fact, in the passage you quoted, half of the words stand for something that would take paragraph each to expand on - but that doesn't conflict with the zoomed-out perspective. Can you tell me where you think I'm wrong about the gist of it?