Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site ssc-vax.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!houxm!hogpc!houti!ariel!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!david
From: david@ssc-vax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Statistics and Evolution
Message-ID: <131@ssc-vax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 7-May-84 12:48:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: ssc-vax.131
Posted: Mon May  7 12:48:19 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 8-May-84 03:29:20 EDT
Organization: Boeing Aerospace, Seattle
Lines: 70

[*]
David Palmer:

>    David Norris has been trying to refute chance evolution using
> numerical arguments.  However, his methods aren't worth a pair of fetid
> dingo's kidneys.

Is this a conclusion or a premise? :-) I offered the few paragraphs that some
enlightened soul could lend some facts that back up or refute them.  These are
not "my" methods.

Dave goes into a discussion of the primordial soup which, I confess, is way
over my head.  I've since purchased a book called "Chemical Evolution", by
S. E. Aw (Head of Dept. of Nuclear Medicine at Singapore General Hospital).
If I can ever make any sense of it, I'll post to net.origins (a group which
I have avoided).

But what's really confusing, is that after using statistics himself, this
paragraph comes out:

> One objection creationists make is that the chances of creating the
> genes to make a man by this process are as close to zero as makes no
> never mind.  This is an incredibly subtle and stupid argument.  The
> chance that your parents' different sperm and ova came together in just
> the right way to create you are incredible, and if you combine that
> with the probabilities of your grandparents' sperm and ova... etc.
> etc., etc.  I can rapidly run up the odds to one in googles of googles
> of googles of... so that it is as close as spitting to impossible that
> you exist.  The fact that you do exist is due to an incredible
> coincidence.  (You can blame it on G-d if you want, but I don't).

Something is very fishy about this line of reasoning, but it was hard to put
my finger on it.  I think it is a gross mis-use of analogy.  Determining odds
that a particular person called Dave Norris could exist can be as incredible as
we want to make it.  As you say, just combine probabilities as far back as
you care to.

Does this refute Boa's argument?  I don't think so.  He didn't extend the
probabilities back to "up" the chances of the event not happening.

Now, given enough time, the primordial soup will come up with something we call
"life".  The time factor is the real problem; the earth is only 4.5B years old,
and some scientists have placed the first life at about t+1B years.  That's
one billion years for the primordial soup to do it's stuff.  Statistics tell
us the probabilities for chance formation of life (in 1 billion years) is
extremely low.  Not impossible, but highly, highly unlikely.

>    Just as an aside, the time it would take these million fast-typing,
> never-sleeping monkeys to type the first four words of one of
> Shakespeare's plays is about 1E24 years (one septillion for North Americans,
> one quadrillion for the British).  If you can't trust Boa & Moody on
> simple calculations, why should you trust them on the origin of life.

Here is the text from Boa & Moody:

: Let's consider George Bernard Shaw's argument that if a million monkeys
: constantly typed on a million typewriters for a long enough time, one of them
: would eventually pound out a Shakespearean play.  Assume a million monkeys
: typing 24 hours a day at 100 words a minute on typewriters with 40 keys.  If
: each word of the play contained 4 letters, the first word would be typed by
: one of the monkeys in about 12 seconds.  However, it would require about five
: days to get the first two words (eight letters) on one of the typewriters.
: How long would it take to get the first four words? About 100 billion years!

It seems to me that your statement simply contradicts Boa's.  Did you compute
this yourself, or get the figure from another text?  Could you give equations
or references, repectively?

	-- David Norris        :-)
	-- uw-beaver!ssc-vax!david