There is so much information in nature for whose origin we cannot account that a chance origin seems unlikely. A recent story about earthworms by Tessa Koumoundouros at ScienceAlert provides an illustration:

Back around when worms wriggled out of saltwater and into freshwater, they experienced a cataclysmic rearrangement of their genetic material.

This event ripped once functioning genes asunder, including some of those involved in critical cell division processes, leaving earthworms, leeches, and their other clitellate relatives with the most scrambled genomes known.

“Everything broke and then rearranged completely randomly,” Rosa Fernández, from Spain’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF), told Christie Wilcox at Science. “I made my team repeat the analysis a thousand times.”

Three groups of researchers have now independently reached this same conclusion, upending a long held assumption that there’s a certain level of genetic stability required for animal species to avoid extinction.

“A Profound Mystery Gave Earthworms The Most Chaotic Genomes Ever Seen,” September 15, 2024 The paper is open access.

But wait. It can’t have been completely random because earthworms are a highly successful life form, especially in the temperate zone.

Even small errors in genetics can have catastrophic results, as the researchers recognize.

“One outstanding question is how this profound genome reshaping event did not result in extinction,” write Vargas-Chávez and colleagues.

They found ancestral marine worm genomes do not seem to be organized in compartments, and so are “much more floppy” than in other animals. “Most Chaotic Genomes Ever Seen.”

Another research team agrees:

“Overall, the ancient bilaterian genome architecture has been completely lost within the clitellates,” a second team, led by evolutionary genomicist Thomas Lewin from Taiwan’s Biodiversity Research Center, found. “Most Chaotic Genomes Ever Seen.” This paper is also open access.

Whatever forces scrambled the worm genomes mapped out new ones, successful for hundreds of millions of years. Chaos does not do that.