Here is a question:
A smart friend of mine and I were having a google chat and I was a bit dumbstruck by what he said. I’ve changed his name to “Mac.” How would you respond?
Mac: Well, statistically, the creation of the universe and evolution in particular are soooooooooo far off that it leads me to think a higher power at least guided evolution and started the creation
If this seems probable then we have to ask ourselves, is there a purpose
Me: I don’t know that that’s true. Remember, it only needs to happen once.
Mac: Ok, I hear that from skeptics/atheists all the time
Have you ever seen a monkey randomly strike a type writer and come close to writing a coherent sentence?
The world being created and humans being created from evolution are about as liekly to happen as a monkey striking a keyboard and writing hamlet
Those things DO NOT HAPPEN
The creation of the universe and evolution are totally unrelated topics. Anyone who conflates the two doesn’t understand either.
However, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the odds of a monkey typing Hamlet are roughly equivalent to those of life spontaneously arising.
How long have monkeys been around? A few million years, if we’re generous with the definition of “monkey”. Hamlet? A few hundred. Typewriters? Less than that, even.
So, we’ve got a window of about 60 years in which our hypothetical monkey could have created his magnum opus, and apparently that’s not long enough.
Now, how long has our universe been around? Billions of years, right? Well, that was long enough.
If you look at it another way, primates have already written Hamlet on a typewriter. Close enough for government work.
Is it improbable? We don’t know. We only have one universe, and one world with demonstrated life. For all we know, universes are a dime a dozen, and every world in the Goldilocks zone is teeming with life.
As you commented, it only has to happen once. Someone gets hit by lightning, someone wins the lottery, doesn’t mean that anything more than chance is involved. It may be hard to convince Roy Sullivan, but statistically improbable things happen all the time.
How much time does the monkey have? One of the things that influenced Darwin in developing the theory of evolution is the sheer amount of time involved. Geology was just hitting it’s stride in his day, and he was in a position to appreciate that there was a nearly unimaginable amount of time available for things to happen.
The thing is, humans don’t evolve as a single extremely unlikely event. Evolution HAS to happen, because the coding of instructions for building life forms are imperfect and have mutations, and mutations have a chance of influencing survivability for their carrier. Just that alone, and the zillions of individual lives over time, necessarily causes different species to evolve and adapt. It is reasonable to wonder about the odds of molecules with replication ability getting started, first igniting the spark of life, so to speak. And we don’t know much about exactly how it ignited, AFAIK. But that’s the event you have to compare to typing monkeys, not the evolution of humans.
By the way, we’re skating on thin ice here, posting our ideas about whether typing monkeys can be coherent. I think we may be in the setup for some kind of joke.
First of all, I’m continuously surprised why the intelligent members of the SDMB seem to be friends with so many dummies.
As to your specific argument:
The simple answer to this question is that the laws of physics in our universe are the way they are simply because that’s the way they have to be in order for intelligent life to evolve as it has. If they weren’t, there would not be anyone around to ponder these things.
Or to put it another way. Lets say the probability of the right conditions existing on a planet to create intelligent life are like one in a billion. The only thing that makes Earth special is that out of a trillion billion planets in the universe, this happens to be one of the ones where those conditions exist.
And we know this because we’re here, and we can only know this if we’re here. If one or more of the conditions were not met, like on all the other bodies in our solar system, we wouldn’t be able to speculate how we came to be here.
From our point of view, the unlikely odds are meaningless, as it clearly happened anyway.
I kinda can’t even take the OP seriously, since one can’t “believe in” evolution. Evolution is a fact, like oxygen. It’s like saying “I believe in my eye color.”
Heh…I’ve never been asked directly if I believe in evolution, but my response would be similar to this. Anyone who claims not to believe in evolution does not understand what it actually is.
Imagine if, every time the monkey produces something which contains a few words of English, you give it a banana. And then you allow it to modify the text it has already written, rather than restart from scratch, and if it manages to change the sentence into something which looks even more like coherent English, you give it another banana. Over time, you start upping the bar, so that it needs to produce not just coherent sentences, but actual meaningful stories in order to get the next banana.
I could see this process eventually producing Hamlet, or something of equal literary value. Especially given a billion monkeys on a billion typewriters for a billion years.
Of course, this analogy is wrong because there is still a human intelligence steering the process. In real evolution, what matters is not producing a work of literary value, but merely producing an organism which can survive long enough to produce offspring, which is a considerably lower bar. Also, it has the convenient feature that no human arbiter is needed, because the environment in which the organism has to survive, does the scoring and culling/rewarding automatically.
Actually, the process of natural selection, genetic drift and gene flow is backed by evidence, but the theory of evolution is never fact: it can be disproven but not proven; only suggested.
Hey, if you look at the four boys in Stand by Me and had to say which one would probably marry one of the hottest women in film would you pick the fat stupid one? No you would not.
As Spock would say “Random factors seem to have operated in our favor.”
Genetic mutation is random. Natural selection is not. So to compare it to monkeys randomly typing on computers is not a legit comparison. If with every instance of reproduction, you were to spin the dials as it were and come what may, yes the idea of evolution would be laughable. But that is not what happens. Tiny mutations occur. Some have a good chance of helping the organism and some have a good chance of hurting it. The malicious changes are killed and the benevolent ones continue to procreate and more mutations occur and so on and so forth.
:smack: Come off it, mate. People believe in all sorts of delusional nonsense, which means they don’t believe in what science tells us, which means others do believe it.
I see you “kinda can’t” take the OP seriously. I don’t know what that means; can you take the OP seriously or can’t you? What’s that mean, you “kinda can’t?” It doesn’t mean anything, now does it?
I have an idea. Forget I wrote those last four sentences and let’s be done with the silliness of taking wording so seriously. I would appreciate an answer to the OP, Kolga.
Take a bucket of golf balls and a driver up to the roof of your house. Put a number on each ball, then tee them up, one by one, and drive them as far as you can, in whatever directions you feel like until the bucket is empty. Then go back down, find each ball and draw a circle around it. Remove each ball and number the circles.
Now take the bucket of balls back up to the roof and repeat the process of teeing them up and driving them. What are the odds you’ll hit each numbered ball into precisely the same spot, with the same lies, as you hit them the first time? How many attempts would you have to make to be able to duplicate where you put the balls the first time? A million? A billion? A trillion? The odds would be astronomical right? The odds would be so ridiculously prohibitive as to be virtually impossible. I guess that proves you couldn’t have done it the first time.
That’s what this “argument from the odds” argument (a standard creationist canard) boils down to. They are drawing bullseyes around arrows after they’ve already been shot, then exclaiming over the phenomenal accuracy of the shooter.
There are some other problems with your friend’s comments as well. Evolution has nothing to do with either the origin of the universe or the origin of life. Evolution only describes what happened (and continues to happen) AFTER life began on earth. The origin of life, abiogenisis, is a separate question which evolutionary theory does not attempt to answer (though there are some very plausible hypotheses). For another thing, evolution has nothing to do with the existence of God. It is not an “atheistic” theory. evolution does not contradict theistic belief, and theistic belief does not contradict evolution