Chance v. Design Part 4 (Evolution)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Wednesday, July 08, 2009, 20:43 (5415 days ago) @ dhw

dhw & Dr. Turell, - Let me try a visual demonstration. - http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/Math/immath/dice.gif - What we have here is a probability distribution of two dice (in keeping with my original tactic.) - Your question of the chances of a chimp pounding out a Shakespearean sonnet is identical to asking what are the chances that we'll select two ones. (In this case, it is 1/36, but say in the case of the sonnet it would be - 1/(27^(the number of letters and spaces in the sonnet)) - The one thing that is the same in both instances, is that the odds of picking any single string of words (or numbers) is absolutely identical to picking the one we're looking for. The odds of picking a sonnet that is different by only 1 letter is also - 1/(27^(the number of letters and spaces in the sonnet) - Mark the dice pairs into "right" and "left." - If you ask the question "What are the odds that the right dice is 5 and the right dice is 2," The answer is also 1/36. - Invent a random string of characters the same length as your sonnet. The odds of pulling this string out of the total number of possibilities is identical to pulling out your sonnet. (Thankfully, letters are just 27-sided dice, so the analogy here is simply one of scale.) If you would like to know my background here, I'm trained in some cryptanalysis, and the statistical techniques such as these are used all the time. But again... as you get closer and closer to perfectly matching the sonnet, you'll have something that more closely matches the string you're looking for, and in this case the question is "how perfectly do you need it to emulate the sonnet?" Is fairly close good enough? When you take this analogy across to one of life, how close do you need the system to be life before you call it life? Chemistry is rarely so perfect. In biochemistry, the structure of many reactions could have been made better had we designed them ourselves. And if we can do... ANYTHING better than a supposed creator, that should seem suspicious as to the power of this entity. - 
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In order to be able to TRULY answer the question of the probability of abiogenesis we would have to have the same information available to us as we do for the dice, namely--knowledge of the entire system under investigation. We would have to be able to run an experiment and see how the different combinatorial distributions of molecules would map out. We--don't have that--so Shapiro (and anyone else for that matter) cannot be taken beyond the raw realm of speculation when they offer odds. (Sorry Dr. Turell, you are mistaken here.) - We're in a situation where we know even less than we'd like to. However, chance offers us a *better* explanation than anything else we've got. (At least we know something about chance!) - If it turns out that life couldn't have arisen here on our planet, then the next thing I would do is start looking for a planet where it could.