James: Vaccines are among the least-profitable products the pharm industry makes. The research and deployment involved needs heavy subsidies from the government to even keep up with demand. The junk science perpetrated by Wakefield, McCarthy, and by association, Oprah, has cost many lives.

Aaron, I have to disagree with both of your points.

First, Deepak is making the incorrect assumption that DNS popped into existence in a single chance event.  This is a straw man; evolutionary theory makes no such claim.

Second, your "flipped" analogy also make the incorrect assumption that individual organisms evolves through some sort of striving for betterment.  This is also a straw man (albeit one that was widely misunderstood 100+ years ago as "Lamarckian" inheritance).  Individual organisms do not evolve.

Your statement, "it's not a logical given that you can extrapolate a small scale observation. There's a limit to every system." quite misses the mark, too.  I am not extrapolating at all.  I am saying a) incremental improvements from one generation to the next are possible (as I imagine you would agree as there are myriad examples), and b) it is also possible for multiple incremental improvements to accumulate over multiple generations (as I also imagine you would agree).  And the word “possible” is very important in both cases.  Such improvements are not guaranteed, they are only possible.  But given lots and lots of time and lots and lots of trials, such accumulation of improvement, somewhere, becomes likely.

I stand by the claim that Deepak Chopra does not understand evolution.

<<Uh, no, its not at all like saying that.  It is like saying that because I can step up a 1/4 inch step, I can, eventually, walk up Mt. Rainier>>

This refutation does not address what Deepak said.  Deepak's analogy was regarding the original creation of DNA, coming together in the first life form.

Nevertheless, I could flip that analogy on you, and ask, does the fact that you can jump 12 inches off the ground, and with practice, improve your vertical leap by a few inches, prove that with enough practice, you could one day jump to the moon?  

You see, it's not a logical given that you can extrapolate a small scale observation.  There's a limit to every system.