@ray That piece demonstrates some apparent misunderstandings of how genetic algorithms or natural selection work, and the bridge analogy doesn't make any sense. A genetic algorithm for making a chess-playing machine wouldn't use, as its generation, individual moves; it would use entire games. And it wouldn't look any steps into the future; it would just make new generations of machines based on machines that were more successful than others at winning chess games in previous generations.

... There are many, many naturally-occurring bridges. And - oh! - a project in 1999 that designed one using a genetic algorithm. But fundamentally, if you're looking trying to evaluate the soundness of natural selection by picking a goal and then trying to design a genetic algorithm to meet it, then you're not getting what natural selection does. The question isn't whether natural selection could make a bridge; it's whether it could have ...

... made a biosphere like the one we have.

@ray As soon as you resort to "Gd may have introduced certain flaws to maintain free will," you're acknowledging that fundamentally, the natural world exists in a way that does not prove that God made it. That is the question at issue here, so I don't get the point of arguing about the details.