[dogma1138]

The length of the words doesn't matter much if you have an effective process to filter and make sense of them and those processes are completely natural.

For example if we take self replicating proteins these will self optimize to an exact letter order which would improve their ability to self replicate in the environment and this isn't conscious since the random assortment that would be better would simply over take the other types in a fairly short amount of time.

Beyond that you still have some random process of "mutation" and that is proteins that were not replicated correctly which can happen for multitude of reasons something bumped into them, temperature changed, acidity changed, random high energy cosmic ray hit them and boom one is not like the other.

If that new protein is now better at replicating in that environment whether it's because this new protein can replicate faster or is more resilient to it's environment and it degrades slower it will take over it's environment and the same holds true for the opposite as if that protein replicates slower it will eventually die out because it cannot compete faster proteins for the available raw materials and so it replicates slower until eventually it's gone.

This is the true beauty of natural selection it works on all processes even those we don't consider biological.

[cristianpascu]

Life is not 'self replicating proteins', but rather self-replicating processes. And in those processes, hundreds of chemical components are involved in a dynamical manner, which requires both spacial (chemical formula) and time synchronization.

And as life complexity increases, so does the the complexity of the processes that make it possible. Humans are the result of a huge number of individual, albeit not all independent, events, each with a very low probability. Multiplying those probabilities, as it's required when determining the probability of occurrence of a sequence of independent events, yields numbers that are hard to event write down without special notations.

As I see it, the only way out is to postulate evolution based on other non-probabilistic evidence, and then to conclude that in spite of the low probability those events still happened.

[UnFleshedOne]

You should not be asking "how likely it is that natural processes could have created life that invented mcdonalds and justin bieber" but "how likely it is that natural processes could have created _some kind_ of intelligent life".

Specific details of a given example (us, the one example we know about) are irrelevant.

In other words: take a coin, throw it 1000 times and record the results. Now calculate the probability of the exact outcome you just got. Pretty low, yet you just did it. Now ask another question -- how likely is that at least 200 of those results are heads? Pretty high.

How unlikely life is is a question of just how big the set of results qualifying as _life_ is. We are (probably) just one possible configuration.