Imagine flipping a coin over and over. For each toss, the odds are fifty-fifty that it will come up heads (a one-in-two chance). The odds of getting two heads in a row is a one-in-two-to-the-power-of-two chance, or one-in-four. Five heads in a row is 1:2^5, or one-in-thirty-two. A hundred heads? 1:2^100, or roughly one in 1.3 trillion trillion trillion (thank Gates for the little calculator program on my computer). A creationist would claim that all the lucky chances that evolution requires is like getting not one, not five, but millions upon millions of heads in a row.
But the creationists are forgetting something. Evolution ISN'T random, as they often claim. It's selected. You can't really blame creationists for missing this fact...Darwin cleverly concealed it from view by calling his theory 'natural selection.' Let's return to our coin-tossing example, this time including the principle of selection. What if, after every toss, we had the option of not counting it? What if we were allowed to simply discard every toss that came up tails? Now, given the ability to select, how long would it take to rack up a hundred heads in a row? About two hundred throws.
Once you understand the concept of selection, and how it applies to evolution, you realize that what was thought to be vanishingly unlikely actually becomes virtually inevitable.
