The number five lottery example, like the number one, is another way of stating the anthropic principle. There's lots more on this at post 70. Here are two restatements of the anthropic principle (from that post):
and...
Faced with such overwhelming improbability, cosmologists have offered up several possible explanations. The simplest is the so-called brute fact argument. "A person can just say: 'That's the way the numbers are. If they were not that way, we would not be here to wonder about it,' " says Rees. "Many scientists are satisfied with that." Typical of this breed is Theodore Drange, a professor of philosophy at the University of West Virginia, who claims it is nonsensical to get worked up about the idea that our life-friendly universe is "one of a kind." As Drange puts it, "Whatever combination of physical constants may exist, it would be one of a kind."
The first link at 562, to the Origin-of-Life Prize, takes you to discussion page which provides the considerations in some detail for scientists making submissions.
I did a quick Google “groups” search to see what people were posting of the first author in the list, Yockey. It looks like his work is irrelevant to current biogenesis concerns for the identical reasons as those of Hoyle. Specifically ”
1) Calculating odds in reverse, “that because cytochrome c is what we have now, the reactions had to select it out of all the possible combinations. As the reactions occurred, cytochrome c became "what we have now"As one of those 1992 critics put it in,2) Ignoring the dynamics of chemical reactions Chemical reactions have a great deal of specificity -- enzymes are designed to make one specific reaction happen. As the cytochrome c sequence developed, the molecular development was likely constrained by molecular orientation -- drastically reducing the number of available combinations.
“His final conclusion is that no, the random sloshing of amino acids together is a very unlikely explanation for the origin of cytochrome c, despite previous suggestions to that effect. This was way back in 1977, of course, so people were still trying to figure that one out. Today, this is standard knowledge, and nobody bothers with such models.” And another
” autocatalytic _networks_ have been proposed in which case you get to include the combinatorial crossmatching of short molocules that are "too short" in the sense your author uses. This means he threw out a factor of more than {10,000!}^20, more than enough to make the probability of life _in his scenario_ approach unity.Alamo-Girl, I saw a previous post here indicating that you were interested in an objective investigation of this. (That can be an ambitious objective.) But I got the impression in your last post to me that you didn’t place the same significance as I on the misapplication of work by Hoyle (and now Yockey). You said, “ The other authors do not make the omissions you mention because they are not making an approximation”. What’s identified here is not just an “omission” when it’s applied to a criticism of biogenesis, it’s a mischaracterization.Why the heck can't you refute the _current_ model? Why post brain dead straw men and refute them?”
There are dynamic relationship between molecules. In the more extreme examples of this dynamic, there are about 4,000 returns on Google for “biogenesis and macromolecules” where independent events operate on different parts of the molecules.
Using conclusions from work ignoring molecular dynamics is misleading in the context of evaluating the probability of biogenesis. It would be like me putting up a web page to refute Creationism, and arguing with claims of an unrecognized pseudo-Christian sect. I hope that’s clear.
As an aside, I also read that Yockey is using the older warm pond presumption rather than more modern deep-sea hot-springs and associated biofauna premise.
I took a look at the other two authors you recommended. I see that they haven’t generated the same controversy as the use of work by Hoyle and Yockey.