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by cristianpascu 2922 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.