From: Susan Brassfield Cogan <susanb@telepath.com>
>At 11:37 PM 08/31/2000 +0100, you wrote:
>>From: Susan Brassfield Cogan <Susan-Brassfield@ou.edu>
>>[...]
>> >If the conditions are right, life is
>> >inevitable.
>
>Richard Wein:
>
>>That may not be true. We have no idea how likely the origin of life was.
>
>why, if the conditions are right in two places would life appear in one and
>not the other? Dawkins makes an assertion to this effect and I've never
>really understood it. If you put flour, eggs, sugar, etc. in the oven it
>will be cake *every time*. I don't understand why it wouldn't be. The
>ID'ers like to think there's an Abracadabra factor but such a thing has
>never actually been demonstrated.
It's not an Abracadabra effect, or miracle, but simply a matter of
randomness. Toss a handful of coins, and the conditions are "right" for them
to come up all heads (i.e. it's possible), but they won't do so very time.
Similarly, the particular chance sequence of events, at the level of
individual molecules, which lead to the origin of life on Earth may not
occur on another virtually identical planet. If the sequence of events is
sufficiently unlikely, then it may have happened nowhere else in the
universe, no matter how many suitable planets there are. On the other hand,
it *may* be that the probability of such a sequence is high enough that we
can consider the origin of life to be a near certainty given the right
conditions. But we just don't know if this is the case.
This is true even if you take a totally deterministic view of nature. Two
planets may have identical conditions to any degree of accuracy that you can
reasonably measure, but they will not be identical down to the location of
individual molecules, so that the subsequent sequence of events on those
planets, at the level of individual molecules, will be different.
Richard Wein (Tich)
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