The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. ~Richard Dawkins Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.~ Ronald Fisher The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability. ~Jerry Pournelle In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson marvels at what makes up human life: No one really knows, but there may be as many as a million types ... The figures vary somewhat from ridiculously improbable to well.....It aint gonna happen that the odds against life beginning in the known expanse and age of the universe are 1 in 10^415, but, as he says himself, this is only true if only one DNA molecule [1000 nucleotides large] were suitable to get biology going. I have pieced this together from a couple of links . To try an illustrate how incredible the odds would look on paper,well literaly there has never been that much paper created to wrtie those odds on. Here is a look. Below is to get you acquainted with how the exponential notation works. the exponential notation 2 50 ,which, incidentally, is equal to 1,125,899,906,842,624. That is one quadrillion, one hundred twenty-five trillion, eight hundred ninety-nine billion, nine hundred six million, eight hundred forty-two thousand, six hundred twenty-four; its easier to say 2 50 (two to the fiftieth). Evolution teaches that in the beginning, inanimate matter, through countless combinations and a great deal of time, arrived at the present highly complex forms of life found on the earth. Lets see what the experts have to say: ...anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near-impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cube faces at random. Now imagine 10 50 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously [emphasis original] arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the earth is evidently nonsense of the highest order. This quote was from Sir Fred Hoyle, an honorary research professor at Manchester University and University College Cardiff. He was a University lecturer in Mathematics at Cambridge. He is a well known and well respected scientist. Chance development of life on earth, in his opinion, is nonsense of the highest order. He also says in another work concerning biomolecules: ...one must contemplate not just a single shot at obtaining the enzyme, but a very large number of trials such as are supposed to have occurred in an organic soup early in the history of the Earth. The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10 20 x10 2000 = 10 40,000 ,an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Mar 2014 09:20:44 +0000
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