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To: powderhorn
"We don't know--and never will know--if there were any special conditions in the universe that would make a transition from non-organic to orgaic matter more probable at the time life came about in the universe. We've only been able to analyze a small percent of what the universe is made up of. "Given what we know," just isn't enough to make any probability statement."

You're still missing the point of the math in this article. We can predict the likelihood of data sequencing itself without intelligent intervention.

We can calculate the odds of data being already sequenced on a hard drive when it is formed. We can know the mathematical probability of characters that are formed by pebbles falling on keyboards - making an English word. Likewise, we can derive the probability / improbability of bases sequencing themselves without intelligent intervention into DNA strands capable of creating life.

And the odds for such occurances aren't good. The author shows that for our alphabet, non-intelligent key-presses are unlikely to ever form sentences of more than 96 characters, with "ever" being defined as 17 Billion years for 17 Billion Earth-like planets.

That is a mathematical way of saying that large, long, complex sequences do not form naturally.

But that doesn't rule out Evolution, natural abiogenesis, the big bang, or even primordial soup theories.

If we could show that Life can be formed from DNA strands that are comprised of fewer than 96 bases in their entire sequence, then there actually would be math that supports the natural creation of life without intelligent intervention.

Then again, showing that sort of Life might very well be akin to showing that Windows XP could be written with 96 lines of code, even though we know that it takes Millions of lines of code to program XP.

Likewise, even the simplist life forms, such as the amoebae, contain Millions of sequential bases in each DNA strand.

744 posted on 04/13/2002 9:28:08 AM PDT by Southack
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To: Southack
We can calculate the odds of data being already sequenced on a hard drive when it is formed. We can know the mathematical probability of characters that are formed by pebbles falling on keyboards - making an English word. Likewise, we can derive the probability / improbability of bases sequencing themselves without intelligent intervention into DNA strands capable of creating life. And the odds for such occurances aren't good. The author shows that for our alphabet, non-intelligent key-presses are unlikely to ever form sentences of more than 96 characters, with "ever" being defined as 17 Billion years for 17 Billion Earth-like planets. That is a mathematical way of saying that large, long, complex sequences do not form naturally.

I wouldn't argue with the mathematical results you propose--in a mathematical universe. A mathematical universe has no characteristics within it that were not put into it. For instance, a mathematical keyboard would never have to face the misfortune of keys being jammed after being bombarded for a very, very long time by little pebbles.

In a real universe the keyboard would have to deal with the forces of nature: gravity, the strong force, the weak force and electromagnetism. In a pristine mathematical universe hydrogen could bounce around forever and remain nothing but hydrogen. But in a universe with the natural cosmic forces at play, you start with hydrogen and get--at minimum--the known periodic table...and that's before even thinking about the unknown properties of the universe, like dark matter.

787 posted on 04/17/2002 12:45:19 AM PDT by powderhorn
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