No, not me; others have done so.
I gather that combinatorial probability anticipates that the actual occurrence of an infinite number of possibilities is equiprobable, given enough time. Yet it actually appears that unless there is an infinite amount of time, this expectation cannot be met. The simple combination model of probability is seemingly incapable of describing the complexity of living systems that we readily observe, let alone accounting for an origin of life from material causes alone.
For instance, Gerald Schroeder points out that a single typical protein is a chain of 300 amino acids, and that there are 20 common amino acids in life, which means that the number of possible combinations that would lead to the actualization of the protein would be 20300 or 10390. He summed up the problem this way: “It would be as if nature reached into a grab bag containing a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion proteins and pulled out the one that worked and then repeated this trick a million million times.” [Gerald Schroeder, “Evolution: Rationality vs. Randomness,” 2000.]
Seems like kinda long odds to me.....
Thanks for writing!
Lurkers might be interested in your more thorough discussion of the issues here:
If the model were correct, those odds would look absurdly long to anyone, and thus would bother anyone. How odd, then, that no one has ever noticed a creationist wondering if that might not mean the model itself is goofily wrong.
You can compute the probability of you happening that way and it would only add another "billion billion" or two to the total. Yet here you are. You didn't jump together all at once from a soup of aminos. The closest you came to jumping together all at once by chance was a long-ago and not-so-chance encounter of an egg and a sperm. The thing that resulted was not exactly you.
Most complex proteins have googolplexes of workable versions. There are lots of known, observed, cytochrome Cs, for instance. The cytochrome C of humans and yeast differ from each other by fifty-something substitutions yet human cytochrome C works fine in yeast cells. Even that's grossly misleading regarding the possibilities of variation, as the observed distribution of c-C is skewed by the common descent of life. It would be possible to make c-C which differs in far more positions and would still work. It turns out that the critical factors are 1) geometry and 2) the exact right aminos at certain key bends and ends. The rest is structural padding. Certain potential substitutions mess up the geometry. Others mess up the "key-aminos-at-reactive-points" restriction. Everything else is OK.
Nobody thinks any particular modern protein just jumped together. Creationists only pretend to think some people think that. Early proteins in early self-replicators were probably simple and inefficient compared to their modern successors everywhere. That is, even in very simple "primitive" organisms the proteins have been evolving for billions of years toward working better. Complexity and efficiency came with competition, that whole "variation and selection" thing creationists make such a hash of.
I'm not a real abiogenesis enthusiast and only once in a blue moon read any of the research on the subject. It's interesting to me, however, to note that the people "refuting" the work being done in this area refuse to address said work AT ALL but only absurd strawmen. Many have been doing so for years on end and are utterly incorrigible in their bizarre perseveration.