Well since it happened once the odds at one time were 100% in favor. I'll accept evolution as reasonable, where I find the "astronomical odds" is the "creation" of functional DNA/RNA out of random snips and bits of amino acids.
I guess it would be like lightning striking twice if it happened again.
Lightning strikes twice all the time! High speed photography has shown that the first touch of leaders from a charged cloud and the ground below establishes a plasma conduit. The actual discharge follows this conduit as a series of strokes in rapid succession following more or less the same pathway. On another time scale tall objects like skyscrapers, mountain tops, broadcasting antennas, and similar are often struck by lightning during the same storm and also over a span of years.
Conveniently, that also eliminates the pesky problem of scientists actually having to replicate the phenomenon so that their proposed explanation can be proven or disproven.
True there, the "bits and snips of random amino acids" have been synthesized by recreating hypothetical early earth conditions. No one has ever observed the synthesis of any larger molecules even remotely resembling DNA. That lack of evidence is to me the invitation to invoke "intelligent design" as the likely source of life on earth.
Regards,
GtG
PS Is there any example of self replicating life which does not involve genes?
“Well since it happened once the odds at one time were 100% in favor.”
No, not really. If you flip a coin and it lands on heads, it wasn’t a 100% chance of landing on heads, it was still only 50%, just like every other flip. Odds are independent of the results, unless you’re talking about some kind of recursive feedback system, where the results affect the conditions that determine the odds.
“Lightning strikes twice all the time!”
Yes, of course you are right. I was just speaking euphemistically. Interesting that you mention the plasma conduit, most folks don’t pay much attention to the plasma interactions in the atmospheric electrical phenomena like lightning. Incidentally, plasma, unlike DNA and RNA, actually does exhibit self-organizing behavior under the right conditions. The electrical currents passing through the plasma generate a magnetic field that can then confine and shape the plasma, redirecting the current, and reshaping the magnetic field into an optimal configuration.
We see a lot of things like that in nature, simple feedback interactions of forces that can produce a self-organization effect instantaneously. However, we don’t see any processes that will require aeons of time to randomly generate self-organization in an nonreplicable manner.
“No one has ever observed the synthesis of any larger molecules even remotely resembling DNA.”
Of course they haven’t. A simple study of the process necessary to replicate DNA in a nucleus should be enough to dissuade any unbiased person of the idea that it could just randomly happen in some hot organic soup.
Besides which, DNA is like a book, not a random collection of “noise”, but actual organized and meaningful information, with syntax and rules. The amino acids are simply the letters. One could decide to write a book with a naturally occurring alphabet, like “sand, crystal, pebble, rock, boulder” each being assigned as a letter. However, if we found a sensible, intelligent book written using such an alphabet, we wouldn’t assume the book itself was naturally occurring just because the elements might be.