Why birds do not fall while sleeping

When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory.

However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.

AFAIK key insight into evolution is not randomness but rather sheer amount of compute. Specifically, evolution is a massively parallel flood algorithm that will try every single mutation. Barely any of them will have positive impact on organism fitness, but some will.

Also worth pointing out that billions of years already sounds like a long time to humans, but once you grasp how quickly everything is moving at the cellular or molecular level then it becomes a really reallllllly long time.

Random factoid I picked up from The Machinery of Life: how do various proteins inside a cell know to find and bind to a specific chemical or protein they need? They don't - everything inside a cell just constantly bumps into everything else, and because of how fast things move at this scale, it doesn't take long for any single thing to touch approximately every other thing inside the cell. I.e. turns out random walk is a viable search mechanism at nanometer scale.

And presumably the size of cells is partly determined by constraining enough of the right things close enough together, so they will bump into each other quickly enough with probability approaching 1.