The length of the words doesn't matter much if you have an effective process to filter and make sense of them and those processes are completely natural.
For example if we take self replicating proteins these will self optimize to an exact letter order which would improve their ability to self replicate in the environment and this isn't conscious since the random assortment that would be better would simply over take the other types in a fairly short amount of time.
Beyond that you still have some random process of "mutation" and that is proteins that were not replicated correctly which can happen for multitude of reasons something bumped into them, temperature changed, acidity changed, random high energy cosmic ray hit them and boom one is not like the other.
If that new protein is now better at replicating in that environment whether it's because this new protein can replicate faster or is more resilient to it's environment and it degrades slower it will take over it's environment and the same holds true for the opposite as if that protein replicates slower it will eventually die out because it cannot compete faster proteins for the available raw materials and so it replicates slower until eventually it's gone.
This is the true beauty of natural selection it works on all processes even those we don't consider biological.
For example if we take self replicating proteins these will self optimize to an exact letter order which would improve their ability to self replicate in the environment and this isn't conscious since the random assortment that would be better would simply over take the other types in a fairly short amount of time.
Beyond that you still have some random process of "mutation" and that is proteins that were not replicated correctly which can happen for multitude of reasons something bumped into them, temperature changed, acidity changed, random high energy cosmic ray hit them and boom one is not like the other.
If that new protein is now better at replicating in that environment whether it's because this new protein can replicate faster or is more resilient to it's environment and it degrades slower it will take over it's environment and the same holds true for the opposite as if that protein replicates slower it will eventually die out because it cannot compete faster proteins for the available raw materials and so it replicates slower until eventually it's gone.
This is the true beauty of natural selection it works on all processes even those we don't consider biological.