EvC Forum: On the origin of life

Lomu writes:

I think my eyes glazed over as so much of it was just a rehash of arguments I first heard twenty years ago- and they were probably old then. But what caught my eye initially was the section containing calculations for the probability of life forming. In my view, just because something is "improbable" doesn't mean it's "impossible". I'll try to illustrate with an example.

Where I live (Victoria) registration plates on cars are numbered like this:

LETTER-LETTER-LETTER-NUMBER-NUMBER-NUMBER

- so you could have (for example) an rego plate of ABC-123 or FTH-677. That gives approximately 17,576,000 different unique plates for the cars here. So, if I take a quick walk down my street and I go past ten cars, what is the probability that the ten cars have the plate combinations that I actually see? I work it out to this number:

1 in 1.7 million, is approximately what I would work it out to be. But I don't pretend to have advanced knowledge of probability nor do I study the symbology in order to pretend to be smart about it like most people seem to. No doubt I am wrong in my fairly simplistic level of education in maths.

Are you saying "it happened" in that you are saying you walked past such a car with that registration? Because in fact the probability is not qualified.

It's all about the relevance beforehand. For example, I read online someone said the probability of winning the lottery twice is billions and billions to one but an expert gave the correctly relevant probability, here in this link, and the probability of A person winning it twice, or, ANY person, is qualified by the number we know are playing it.
Page not found - Stats & Data Science Views

Here's what he said;

Talbot writes:

albot writes:

'Assuming that:

-Winners consider themselves lucky and so continue to play (twice a week).
-Jackpot winners live for 30 years (from the date of their first win).
-The overall number of players doesn't decrease (and so the average number of winners each week remains at least 2.4).
-The lottery runs for another 20 years.
-Players choose their numbers independently at random (say by using the Lucky Dip option).

The chances that someone wins the lottery twice before 2034 is greater than 60%

If you have already walked past the car with that registration plate the probability that is relevant is 1 in 1.

Now if you predict a certain plate by choosing the plate from known plates, randomly, then walk past ten cars and you get the number, THEN AND ONLY THEN will your large improbability-figure count.

You see improbable things only happen each day because VAST NUMBERS mean they aren't really unlikely. But think of it this way, if there had only ever been one lottery and your chance was about 1 in 14 million, and you were going to be the only player to ever play it, and the lottery would only happen once, because there aren't on average, 14 million attempts, the true chance you would win is NO CHANCE.

The problem with abiogenesis is the probability is so vast that in realistic terms, the probability of life assembling itself, is so close to 0% that basically it is 0%.

You might say, "but it's not 0 percent." So then think of it in terms of this analogy; imagine you run a marathon and I run a marathon, and it is a mega-marathon, your finishing time is 100 hours, 5 minutes and 5 seconds. Now imagine my finishing time is 100 hours, 4 minutes and 4.999 seconds.

IN REALISTIC TERMS, there is no difference that means anything.

For example, imagine I took a fifty pence coin, placed it on my patio, took a pen marker, and drawn a red outline around it, then gave the fifty pence to an astronaut, and said, "blindfold your fellow astronaut, have him randomly drop the fifty pence from orbit and let's see if it lands exactly inside the outline I drawn on the ground".

Let's face it, if you have 5 million astronauts on 5 million planets, attempting it for each day of their lives, it would just never happen. If you got the coin in my garden that would be a miracle.

So the question is, is abiogenesis trying to happen at times, all over the universe? So that is the difference mathematically, because the lottery or registration plates are true statistics, but as for primordial worlds, who knows how many exist, and who knows if it truly is possible for an abiogenesis to break all of the rules of entropy?

So IMHO, it's a false comparison because you have to assume abiogenesis is being played like the lottery, all over the universe.

Is it? I don't know. If it is, perhaps then your argument might have something to it but the problem is, this still doesn't give physical material things any reason to build themselves. For example, an amino acid is not alive, the same as a brick, therefore many bricks even if they could form themselves into a wall, in 10 trillion brick-worlds full of bricks, would have no reason to continue with the build. They would never build themselves into a cathedral because they are not trying to. It is the mistake of anthropomorphism, to give physical elements, designer-ambitions.

Edited by mike the wiz, : No reason given.

6 online now:	dwise1, LamarkNewAge, Minnemooseus (Adminnemooseus), Omnivorous, Percy (Admin), Theodoric
Newest Member:	ChatGPT
Post Volume:	Total: 916,415 Year: 3,672/9,624 Month: 543/974 Week: 156/276 Day: 30/23 Hour: 0/3