BQ: Let's imagine a new way of editing a textbook: we'll give textbooks on educational psych to each college sophomore student across the whole country, but each will get a slightly different textbook with a unique set of about 100 random errors. At the end of the year, we'll test all the students, and we'll only save the books (information) from the students with the 100 best scores. These texts will be used in the next round of copying, which will introduce new errorsss. Can we expect to see a steady improvement in the textbooks? Will we expect the students average grades to increase?
A: Essentially none of the misspellings would be beneficial. Furthermore, the errors will have little correlation to the students' overall grades, as there are extrinsic factors at work. This is very similar to genetic noise. When looking at evolutionary theory, it is important to understand that the theory never states WHERE the first textbook came to be, nor even how it could have come to be. It is also important to understand, as mentioned before, that evolution does not select for individual genes, but rather must take the entire bundle. One line may have corrected "Educational psycholoy is the study of..." to "Educational psychology is the study of," but it will get many more new errors introduced at the same time.
Fitness secondary to phenotypic superiority (that is, the whole package we see outwardly, not an individual gene) is actually what natural selection acts upon. While many want to wave a magic wand and say, "See, it works," it turns out that this very basic thing is very POORLY inherited, perhaps as low as .004. This means that environmental factors are more important than genetics in determining "fitness."
And what does this mean for evolution? Evolution needs to remove mutants to prevent genetic entropy, but it is unable to do so through genetic "natural selection." Long-term evolution is impossible as it ensures genetic degeneration and eventual extinction of species.
(Kimura, M. The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution, Cambridge; Evolutionary Rate at the Molecular Level, Nature | Sanford, J., Baumgardner P., Gibson, W., ReMine, W., Using Computer Simulation to Understand the Mutation Accumulation Dynamics and Genetic Load, International conference of computational science)