[andreareina]

It's not a hard violation, just that they are large enough and there are enough of them that you would not expect them to form in a universe that is otherwise described by the cosmological principle.

A random array of points can form a grid, but if you see a grid somewhere the natural assumption is that it wasn't formed by a random process.

[m3047]

Yet any arbitrary sequence (e.g. of bits) has an equal probability of occurring in a random bitstring. 111111 is equally likely as 100110 or 010101. Asked "which one is random?" most people would say the middle one (even people who know better, like me).

Personally I discount the likes of 111111 and 010101 because I know there are artificial processes which produce those sequences and so I discount them on that basis. Yet if you were training a machine to recognize "random" data you'd need to include one sample of each of the possible 2^6 sequences to train it on representative data.

There is another category of random / not random to be considered: self-similar data, where there is similar data in the same area or at different scales. Taken in total, all sequences in this "universe" may be nonetheless randomly distributed.

A taxonomy / review of sequences which we generate inordinately and what phenomena are affected is missing. Self-similar data always deserves a second look, although the cause can be a natural self-organizing principle (e.g. literal snowflakes).

[prmph]

Then why is life, which is more complex and structured, assumed to have arisen by chance?

If random processes can give birth to structure, then one can also argue that maybe this ring is a fluke.

Remember that randomness is not necessarily uniformity

[dTal]

Life is an extremely interesting and complex phenomenon worthy of study. It's not a counterexample to the observation that structure and complexity indicate interesting phenomena, rather than "coincidence".

[prmph]

Yes, this ring could be an example of structure, but what caused the structure?

One explanation is that it is not due to any new physics; it is just that randomness happened to produce that apparent structure.

So my point is, if we go looking for some new physical phenomena that could have produced the structure, then why the unwillingness to probe unknown forces that could have produced life?

[mc32]

Because of ideology. They’re both inquisitive but one veers to close to other subjects considered fanciful such as simulations or some creator force, whereas the other seems to seek other types of scientific explanation.

[candiodari]

Because it only needs one random "hit". After that self-replication makes sure it doesn't have to happen again.

Btw: the first self-replicating molecules wouldn't have been particularly complex. It may have been a half-broken piece of RNA, not from base atoms but from nucleic acids. And it only matters that it formed RNA (it does not matter what the code "in" the RNA was. It would be self-replicating no matter what that code was, so there were many valid possibilities). Also there's no need to get the "ladder" part of the molecule right. Yes it requires random chance, sure, but it may not be all that unlikely.