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The contradiction is still valid in big step evolution.

Kind of like guessing a passcode to a lock. You still try all the combinations, but there are no intermediate steps - you either guess it all at once, or not at all.

If we see a bunch of locks opened by someone who couldn't have had the code, it doesn't mean they had a method to open. They could've just spent a lot of time guessing.

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Indeed, we need to look at external factors like time/energy expenditure to determine the efficiency of the operation in order to have a hope at constraining its method. If the NSA were to suddenly publish a list of 1,000,000,000 broken SHA512 keys, and there was no sign of any spikes in energy expenditures, we could strongly suspect that they did not generate them from brute force means. Similarly, if we have hundreds of millions of distinct species on the planet, and only a few years of time on the planet (relative to the rate at which we've observed beneficial random mutations actually occurring), we can suspect that the bulk of the speciation did not occur through stochastic means.

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