Night after night throughout the region, meals are prepared. A recipe appears. The recipe gets replicated whenever a guest or a relative asks to have it, and it is replicated even more when it is included in the PTA fundraiser cookbook. Each new owner of the recipe is likely to alter it a bit, leaving out a disliked ingredient, adding a radish rosette. The analogy, however is flawed.
Design does creep in.
Food preparers do think, and have short-term goals in mind. Other analogies avoid the problem of teleology. You and I are the highly improbable outcomes of all the chance meetings, feelings of love, mutual attractions, rapine roughness, release of particular ova, and plain old fluid dynamics of all the couplings of all our ancestors since the dawn of history. We were not envisioned in our glorious uniqueness by any of the players in our past. But this analogy, too, is imperfect.