All this means that natural selection does nothing to help generate functional DNA base (or amino-acid) sequences, that is, new genetic information. It can only preserve such sequences (if they confer a functional advantage) once they have originated. Adaptive advantage accrues only after the generation of new functional genes and proteins—after the fact, that is, of some presumably successful random mutational search. Thus, the evolutionary mechanism as a whole depends upon an ineliminable element of randomness—a point that even other evolutionary biologists acknowledged after the debate in
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