On these matters, Darwin, gravity, things like that, I deliberately have tried to walk away from what may or may not be true towards what does or does not work. It allows me in my own way to sidestep the notion of a conflict between natural science and theology.
Natural science's job is to describe what see can measure, to construct ideas, and for those ideas to reliably inform ... for them to predict outcomes.
The Theory of Gravity may entirely be a bunch of crap, but we can design boat hulls of large ships before ever putting them in water, we can sling things to distant planets, and so on. It may be crap, but it works.
Evolution theory is as valuable and as reliable. It may be a load of crap, but it makes predictions, affords opportunity to those who subscribe to it, ... and it works.
So gravity and evolution can be a load of crap, but they are equally effective in affording me opportunities to interact with the physical world.
Meaningfully and profitably:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/3527603697.ch13/summary
Darwin took on a number of significant risks in his publication of the Origin of the Species, and what bugs me is he spoke directly towards those items of legitimate criticism that today so many accuse him of having never considered.
Darwin took on Intelligent Design head on, long before the folks in the US in thinking it is necessary to merge science and theology cooked up the very notions of "It can be so, cause it seems so unlikely".
An important appendix in Origin of the Species is Darwin's treatise on the development of the eye, a complex organ that would seemingly not come about through incremental advantages his Theory required. I think Darwin argued ably on that matter and won't try to do any better here.
But getting back to the notions mentioned her about Darwin would have burned his book if he had known bout DNA misses an important point.
Darwin's ideas required (and hence predicted) two critical things:
1) that there is some sort of heritable database that preserves information affording advantage, and that that database at some slow rate, makes mistakes. It cannot make mistakes at a high rate, because we cannot preserve advantage, but it must not be flawless, it must make mistakes to afford the change for selection to act on. Darwin would have remarkable satisfied to later learn there was a database (DNA), that the machinery that replicates it very good, but that it does at a low level make mistakes ... "the mutations" Darwin's Theory *required*.
2) For any of this to make sense, Darwin's theory required an old world, a very very very old world. Wildly older than the numbers in Genesis would suggest ... and wildly older than pretty much any natural scientist at the time would consider.
We now have daing techniques that, again as both predicted and *required* make for a very very old world indeed.
So, while the assembly of DNA seems complex (and it is a rather simple molecule, not so complex as suggested here earlier, and that it assembly seems unlikely to happen again in the next week or so, given a billion years, it not only become possible, it becomes rather probably.
The more that is discovered the more it becomes almost unimaginable that life did not evolve. It quite simply had to happen. The odds against it happening are remarkably small. The odds are less like winning the lottery, and more like losing the lottery.
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