Possible?

In this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=43690 I showed how totally ignorant I am. And I admit I don’t know a lot about evolution. I won’t say it is wrong. I can’t deny evolution, but I also can’t deny creation.

Now all that being said, there was one poster (I don’t remember the name) who said the following after I said something about Earth being in just the right spot to support life.

"How in the world did Earth happen to be the exact right distance away from the sun with the exact right chemical composition to create an atmosphere and keep it heated at just the right temperature to get life to thrive?

Absolutely pure 100% complete chance. But notice luck wasn’t one of the words I used."

My question is this. How can this be? I heard an analogy, or whatever you call it, one time that said something like if you put 10,000 monkeys in a room and give them each a piano, one of them, in time, may accidently bang out the Warsaw Concerto.
Sound like just about the same thing. Like I said, I’m not the smartest sandwich at the picnic.

Can someone please explain it to “the village idiot”. (That would be me. :smiley: ) Thankyou.

It is simple statistics.

If the odds of winning the lottery are a million to one, the odds are against you winning it.

However, you have a million people with tickets, and it is enevitable that someone will in the lottery.

The word “luck” is just semantics here. One could easily make the same argument about dying by being hit by a meteorite. The odds are astronomical that this will be your fate. The odds are very GOOD that someone in the next 1,000 years on this planet will have this happen to them.

That’s not luck either…


Yer pal,
Satan

*I HAVE BEEN SMOKE-FREE FOR:
Six months, three weeks, three days, 17 hours, 57 minutes and 7 seconds.
8309 cigarettes not smoked, saving $1,038.74.
Extra life with Drain Bead: 4 weeks, 20 hours, 25 minutes.

David B used me as a cite!*

I suppose this falls under padding my post count, since everything I know about cosmology and evolution I learned in a public high school, which is not often the best place to gain knowledge.

However, it SOUNDS as though what you’re thinking (correct me if I’m wrong) is that here’s the sun flying through space, and all of a sudden its gravity catches on to the earth and sucks it in to just the right spot.

That’s not what happened according to what I learned (again with the caveat that what I learned in school could be discredited or out of date by now). What happened was when the sun itself came together, it threw off matter as it spun, creating the planets. This accounts for why the plents are more or less in the same plane of space. The planets themselves gained extra matter in the form of meteor strikes and the like.

So yes, it is pure chance that the earth ended up being just the right mass and distance from the sun to support life (in a sense: I accept evolution and the currently held theories of cosmology, but I also believe that God put these mechanisms in motion).

Let’s give you a better analogy.

It’s been calculated that there are some 100 billion stars in our galaxy. That’s 10 to the 11th power.

Let’s assume that only 1 out every hundred of those stars are like our own (a G type star, yellow). That leaves some 1 billion stars left that are like our own sun.

Now, lets say that out of those billion stars, only 1 out of a hundred have planets. That leaves 100 million stars with planets.

And out of all of those, only 1 in a hundred have a planet in the right range to have a temperature that will support life “as we know it.” (more on this later) That leaves 1 million planets.

And out of those million planets, only 1 in 100 actually evolve life thru some form of abiogenesis. That leaves some 100,000 planets with life “as we know it”.

Now, about the “life as we know it” comment. We only have one example of how life formed, here on earth. But given the way chemistry works, things can be changed and what wouldn’t work here, could work on another planet. You change the proportions of various chemical elements and different situations and poof a different form of life.

Also, all life on our planet is based on carbon. Look at a standard chemical element chart and you’ll find silicon right below carbon. Silicon has similar properties to carbon. Those properties are similar enough that some chemists have seriously speculated on what a life-form based on silicon would be like.

While there isn’t nearly as much silicon in the universe as there is carbon (read a good book on super novas to find out why) there’s probably enough to make silicon-based life possible.

So, given enough time and materials, you could come up with life. You just have to be patient.

Keep in mind, when you put those monkey’s in the room, it wasn’t in the hopes that one of them would write the Warsaw Concerto. The Warsaw Concerto didn’t exist when you started any more than life on earth existed before there was earth. And the Warsaw concerto is not the only possible piece of music. Given that, it doesn’t seen quite as extrodinary that one of them happened upon it. It’s only really extrodinary once you look back on it.

There was an extrodinary chain of coincidence, luck, historical movements etc. that, had any of them been the least bit different (had that peasent not had that one last beer, causing him to fall asleep, allowing his wife to go out a be impregnated by that solider- who was there because Napoloen choose to invade that night) I wouldn’t exist. If you think about it the possibility that I even exist is pretty slight.

The scary thing is…this actually makes sence. =)

(Ooooo! All those monkeys!)

The easy answer is that if life had not evolved, we wouldn’t be here to point out how unlikely it was that we evolved.

Its threads like this that make me glad that I have a ridicuously long bookmark page:

Monkey trying to write Shakespeare

In Clifton Fadiman’s wonderful anthology Fantasia Mathematica, there’s a wonderful short story titled “Inflexible Logic” by Russell Maloney, about a man who actually sets up this very experiment – substituting “all the books in the British Museum” for “all the works of Shakespeare” – and the chimps do not spoil one piece of paper! They type out, among other things, “Trevelyan’s Life of Macaulay, the Confessions of St. Augustine, Vanity Fair, part of Irving’s Life of George Washington, the Book of the Dead, and some speeches delivered in Parliament in opposition to the Corn Laws. . . .” I will provide no spoilers – you’ll have to track it down yourself.

For Simpson’s fans:

“It was the best of times, it was the blerst of times??? The blerst of times!!! Stupid Monkey!”

The chance of yesterday’s lottery being what it was is what? 18 million to one? How about the last year’s worth of Lottery numbers? Astronomical, yet a quick check of the record reveals that the last year of lottery numbers did, in fact, fall in exactly the same order that they did.

The sheer size of the improbability does not make it impossible that this event happened. It would have been impossible to predict this sequence a year ago, but happen it did.

Another way of looking at it cheezit:

Suppose our planet were where Mars is and it were put in our place. Life undoubtedly would have to be very different, with biological mechanisms for retaining heat, more sensitive eyesight, perhaps a higher ratio of mineral feeding critters and less whose food chain depends ultimately on photosynthesis, plus a whole host of other things that would have to change. Evolution would take a vastly different path there. Eventually, assuming that an intelligent species were to evolve, somebody on Mars would say “What? You think we are here by chance? Do you realize how many variables we depend on that have to be just so? Why, if we were on that third planet there, we would burn up!”

In other words, whatever kind of life does evolve, no matter where it evolves, a host of variables have been important to get it there. Successful life is that life which can best survive in its environment. Change the environment and of course the life would not exist as it is, because all the things that help it survive are tuned to the original set of circumstances.

Although jmullaney’s phrasing may be a bit flippant, it kind of captures the basics of the Anthropic Principle.

There are many things about our universe that seem arbitrary, but which are required for our existence. One I remember from college is the distance of our sun from the center of the Milky Way. If we’d been much closer to the center, the density of matter would have been too high for a small planet like Earth to coalesce. Any farther away, and there wouldn’t be enough matter to form planets at all (it’s been a couple years, I don’t know if that view still holds with the recent evidence of planets around other stars). What an amazing coincidence that we happen to be in the small band of space where we can survive.

Well the Anthropic Principle says it’s not really a coincidence at all. We can only ask “why are we here?” in a place where we can survive long enough to ask it. That’s probably not the last word in the creation/evolution debate, but it explains why evolution can look so improbable but still be true.

The link above is to a short overview of the principle, with links to a few more sites on the subject.

cheezit: You asked a (presumably) honest question, and a bunch of Dopers have used a bunch of different analogies and cites to answer it essentially the same way.

I now ask you: Did this answer your question to your satisfaction?


Yer pal,
Satan

*I HAVE BEEN SMOKE-FREE FOR:
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8314 cigarettes not smoked, saving $1,039.26.
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David B used me as a cite!*

I thank all of you for your answers. I guess I am still a little skeptical. The odds are, after all, astromical. I guess it is probably a combination of my upbringing and what I was taught in school. I can’t really remember much of what I was taught, since it was so long ago. I graduated from High School in 1966, and as I recall, neither evolution or creation was really taught much. The only thing that sticks in my mind is that poster that shows monkeys in various stages of developement up to and including man. I don’t really think scientists had too much of a clue as to the universe back in the 50’s and early 60’s. Shoot, when I was a kid, they didn’t even have T.V. :smiley: Since then, though, science and astronomy have come a long way. Obviously, I haven’t come quite as far. I was also brought up going to church every Sunday. We all know that they don’t believe in evolution. This is why I’m skeptical about evolution in general. Some things about it are very believable but other things seem to me to go against the grain, so to speak. I’m open to new ideas and I would like to learn some new things, but at the same time, keep my religious beliefs. Is that possible?

After all, I don’t want to be known as the straightdope “dim bulb”. :smiley:

Cheezit, so long as you have the attitude that you want to learn new things, you are miles and miles ahead of the dim bulb crowd.

As far as keeping your religious beliefs goes, plenty of people are quite reconciled in their belief of both religion and the proclamations of modern science regarding evolution and cosmology. Science may alter your beliefs if you are a Biblical literalist. It really isn’t possible to reconcile the two positions in that case, but what of that really? If someone comes to the conclusion that Genesis is a metaphor because of the observable evidence, does that really change the nature of God, Jesus, or mankind’s relationship with the infinite? Of course not. It’s not as if God was going to tell the ancient Jews about quarks, gluons, and probability fields now is it?

Part of the problem you seem to have with accepting some of what science has to say is that it is counterintuitive. Probability generates huge, impossible sounding numbers whenever you look away from strictly human concerns and gaze at the universe. We humans have no real applicable sense of scale when confronting numbers and distances so vast, and it can overwhelm one’s comprehension. But, like it or not, if we want to figure out the workings of the universe we have to deal with those scales. Try this: Go outside tonight and look up at a faint star. We know that light travels at around 186000 miles per second, which is, no matter how you slice it, pretty damn fast. The photons from this faint star you are looking at may have been in flight for many thousands of years, and if the “star” you happen to pick is actually another galaxy when examined under higher magnification, even longer. Considered the situation of the photon when it was emitted from the star. How likely is it that this photon will travel for thousands of years, at 186000 miles per second, avoid being absorbed by any other matter, have its path altered nearly imperceptibly by the gravity fields it traverses, pass through the millimeters-wide aperture of your pupil, and strike a particular rod cell on your retina in order to help excite a photochemical reaction, while you present a moving target by standing on a planet that is simulataneously spinning on its axis, revolving around the sun, as the whole system rotates around the center of our galaxy? The odds of that happening are so mind bogglingly remote that it’s tempting to call anything that succeeds against those kinds of odds miraculous. And yet, it just happened. In fact, you can recreate this improbable miracle at will, by just looking upwards. This is an example of why “What were the odds against blah happening?” is not a particularly interesting question to ask once it has already happened. If you think about it, almost everything that ever goes on is, on a human scale, impossible.

“If an infinite number of posters posted an infinite number of posts to an infinite number of threads, how long would it take before one of them made sense?” :smiley:

::: ducks and runs :::

Classic layman error about conditional probability. The probability you’re trying to compute Cheezit should not be the probability of event A occurring. Rather it should be the probability of event A occurring given that event B has already occured.

To illustrate:

I have two cats - Fifi and Trixibelle*. No other cats are capable of entering my house.

Suppose that the probability of one cat stealing another cat’s food is 0.01%**

After sleepily dishing out food at 9am, I have been lazing in bed with Fifi all morning. I therefore know with 100% certainty that Fifi hasn’t touched her food bowl. Meanwhile Trixibelle has been prowling the house.

Upon finally dragging myself out of bed and downstairs I discover (horror!) that Fifi’s food is gone!

What is the probability that Trixibelle stole Fifi’s food?

The answer is not 0.01%. The answer is 100%. The only possible solution to the conundrum is that Trixibelle did it.

We can flesh this out with a little use of symbols.
Let P(A) be the probability of event A occurring.
Let P(A|B) be the probability that event A occurs given that event B has already occurred
Let T and S be the events “Trixibelle steals Fifi’s food” and “Fifi’s food has been stolen” respectively.

Then P(T) = 0.01%, because the probability that a cat steals another cat’s food is 0.01%.
However P(T|S) = 100% because we know that food has been stolen.

Worryingly this error is not limited to cats and foodbowls. Even professionals routinely make the above error. I’ve seen lawyers use the above trick with DNA evidence and the media not realise the error. I’ve seen the medical profession misinterpret illness-testing data. I’ve even seen Cecil screw it up ( http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_189.html ). The long and the short of it is that statistics are counterintuitive.

TO bring it back to your problem: The question is not “What is the probability of the sequence of events involving star and planet formation, evolution and everything else”. It is “What is the probability of this, given that we are here to ask the question.” The probability of this is of course: 100%.

regards,

pan

*not really folks. This is an illustration only
**ditto. No cites please.
PS to give a fuller formulaic approach:

P(A|B) = P(A n B)/ P(B) where P(A n B) is the event “A and B both occur”

In the illness-testing scenario for instance we may have the case where the probability that a member of the population has a disease is 1/50000 and the probability that a test is positive where a member does not have the disease is 1%. A test comes back positive. What is the probability that the patient has the illness? Left as an exercise to the reader, but let me tell you that it is not 99%.

Two opposing point of view, each with some compelling arguments–

I. In a school for the blind, a couple hundred blind students plus one student who has partial sight in one eye file into the auditorium. The partially sighted student notices that the lights are not turned on, and worries that the guest speaker could fall off the stage, and brings it to the teacher’s attention. No one expresses astonishment that the person to bring this matter to the teacher’s attention would JUST HAPPEN to be able to see or says that this is an unlikely coincidence unless sighted persons were simply more concerned about other people.

II. On the almost completely flat surface of the asphalt roadway and sidewalks close to where Mr. Jones is washing his car, the water pools and meanders and trickles. At very close range, something as small as a grain of sand may determine whether or not the moving edge of the water will flow this way or that. However, over time, the water descends; it keeps finding its way downhill. It does not merely do this as a result of downhill-bound water pathways being more successful at providing yet further places for the water to expand, and it certainly does not do so by sheer chance.
The latter perspective probably requires considerably more defending on this board. I would say that to think of consciousness as “a factor that helps ensure survival of one’s progeny” is akin to saying that downhill-bound water pathways tend to be more successful at providing further places for water to expand than uphill-bound water pathways. (i.e., it isn’t so much that such a statement is wrong, but that it so severely understates matters).

Not all religions don’t believe. For example, the Roman Catholics’ have accepted evolution, the big bang, etc…
People the world over have accepted evolution with no harm to their faith.