Natural Selection's Speed Limit and Complexity Bound

Abstract

Yesterday, I wrote: Humans can do things that evolutions probably can't do period over the expected lifetime of the universe. As the eminent biologist Cynthia Kenyon once put it at a dinner I had the honor of attending, "One grad student can do things in an hour that evolution could not do in a billion years." According to biologists' best current knowledge, evolutions have invented a fully rotating wheel on a grand total of three occasions. But then, natural selection has not been running for a mere million years. It's been running for 3.85 billion years. That's enough to do something natural selection "could not do in a billion years" three times. Surely the cumulative power of natural selection is beyond human intelligence?