Lately I've been reading "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins, in itself it's a good book, though it's mainly preaching to the choir in my case.
But a thought began to fester in my mind while reading about the anthropic principle on the origin of life, specifically the chapter starting on page 162 called "The Anthropic Principle: Planetary Version".
Here Hawkins uses the anthropic principle to argue for the unlikely chemical event that causes the origin of life.
The God Delusion page 164 "Again, as with Goldilocks, the anthropic alternative to the design hypothesis is statistical. Scientists invoke the magic of large numbers. It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Knocking a few noughts off for reasons of ordinary prudence, a billion billion is a conservative estimate of the number of available planets in the universe. Now, suppose the origin of life the spontaneous arising of something equivalent to DNA, really was a quite staggeringly improbable event. Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets. A grant-giving body would laugh at any chemist who admitted that the chance of his proposed research was only one in a hundred. But here we are talking about odds of one in a billion. And yet ... even with such absurdly long odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets - of which Earth, of course, is one."
In itself this is a fine argument, but the thought that began to fester was that he is missing the time scale in this. The billion to one chance over how long a time? As I understand it, the chance of chemical bonding is measured in seconds (since it requires a lighting strike), with the whole experiment taking less then a week to run (see Miller-Urey experiment). Which leads me to ask: "Why hasn't life arisen from anew over and over in Earth's history?"
The calculations is as follows: 60 X 60 X 24 X 365.25 = 31,557,600 is the number of seconds in a year. The timeframe of Earth being able to host life is 4 billion years. So the calculation is 31,557,600*4,000,000,000 /1,000,000,000 = 126,230,400 times that life has arisen anew. Knocking a few noughts off for reasons of ordinary prudence leaves us with still over a million times, and this clearly isn't the case.
And the big question in my mind is why isn't this the case? Input is greatly appreciated before Dawkins turns me towards Deism
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
- John Kenneth Galbraith
I haven't had time to give this a serious look, but a few considerations spring to mind.
First, Earth may have been able to host life for about 4 billion years, but has abiogenesis been possible for all this time, or does this require a 'primordial soup'? That is, has the first life changed the environment so much that other life had a much lesser chance of forming?
Second, what would happen if new life formed in an environment where other life was already established? My guess is that these new life forms would find it extremely hard to prosper. Natural selection would certainly apply between 'life form families'.
Third, there are theories that we ourselves (more precisely, our cells) are conglomerates of different life forms. Several life forms could have formed somewhat simultaneously, and instead of fighting each other, they started to work together. Looking at our cells it certainly could seem like it was formed of different parts in a symbiotic relationship. Symbiosis, parasitism and other forms of 'networking' are very common among single-celled organisms, and many geneticists believe that horizontal transfer of genetic material (as opposed to vertical transfer from ancestors to descendants) between species is the most important form of gene transfer among the simpler organisms. Maybe this happened between different life forms too.
Fourth, maybe there are other life forms, but they're just so different from us and from what we would expect that we don't notice them?
I think the correct answer is probably a mix of different degrees of the first three points.
Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking. ~ Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan
When I kill her, I'll have her
Die white girls, die white girls
I just realized the reason why smart people become religious.
Their (own perceived) superior intelligence makes them so arrogant, they think they're so smart that if there's something they don't understand, no one can ever understand it. The only conclusion they can arrive at after that, is that there must be someone or something supernaturally superior to them in order to explain this, and they invoke God.
Of course, this does not apply solely to smart people, but also to people who think they're smart. Which is pretty much everyone. Interesting. So I guess arrogance explains all religion.
When I kill her, I'll have her
Die white girls, die white girls
Gilli hevur raett, paragraffin omanfyri gevur bara meining um eitt tidarskeid er specifiserad ella tikid fyri givid. Eg haldi at Dawkins dugur sitt shit innan probability ivaleysa vael, so hatta veit hann.
Fyri maer gevur handan paragraffin bara meining vid at taka fyri givid at sannlikindini hann nevnir eru yvur livitidina av planetini... ikki ivur sekund. Altso - one in a billion over the lifetime of the planet.
Sjalvandi.. argumentid er simpult, men einhvor nidurstoda gjort ut fra hesum er bogus, ti at forutsetningarnir eru okendir. Vit hava ikki peiling fyri fyri hvorji sammanlogdu sannlikindini eru fyri spontanum livi, so um tad gerst til "one in a billion billion" heldur enn "one in a billion" so er nidurstodan ein heilt onnur, vid just sama retorikki.
Eg royni ikki at spilla Dawkins ut... eg hati bara statistik!
Tad burdi verid forbodid at tosa/retorisera um sannlikindi osfr alment, ti folk seta ikki vanliga spurning vid forutsetningarnar. Impakti av bokini hevdi verid eitt sindur utvatnad um har var ein disclaimer sum segdi "actual results may vary*" vid einum sub-disclaimer a aftastu sidu sum segdi "by +/- 100000%"
Populist statistikkur - BAH!
Eg skal koma vid minum egna disclaimer her, eg havi ikki lisid alla bokina, og eiheldur havi eg lisid alt annad sum hann ella onnur hava skrivad um evnid. Mitt littla upstod er tikid i context av bert hasum paragraffinum, og handlar um argumentation, ikki um sannlikindini fyri livi.
