No, it's not false. The lottery is not a like for like example because someone has to win at every draw, although given the odds against, it's unlikely to be you. Given the odds I quoted for part of Shakespeare's work, the event is NOT going to happen and bear in mind that the amount of information contained in Shakespeare's works is miniscule compared with the information required to form life from lifeless chemicals, make it reproducible and continue to develop. If you believe otherwise, you are in deceiving yourself.
Look at what a statistician has to say, plus another comment below:-
"“If there is a chance that something can happen, and the exact same situation happens an infinite amount of times, will that possibility have to happen?”
Ask a statistician: no it doesn’t *have* to happen. A probabilist would say that it happens “almost always”. If I toss a fair coin the chance of a head is 50%. If I toss a fair coin an infinite number of times the probability of getting at least one head is 100%. However there is no physical or mathematical reason why I can’t toss an infinite number of tails, and no heads. In fact this is as equally likely as any other sequence of heads or tails. Take all sequence of length N (number=2^N) and then consider the number of them that have no heads(=1). Then the proportion with no heads =1/2^N which approaches 0 as N approaches infinity. But there is always 1 sequence of length N with no heads.
Hence 100% probability means “almost always”, it doesn’t mean “it has to happen”.
steve l says:
August 3, 2013 at 1:35 pm
This is the most nonsensical meme floating around the Internet.
Consider the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, …
There are infinitely many of them … so 2 must show up more than once, right? Manifestly wrong.
But say we are talking about states of matter in a finite region. This would be modeled by using finitely many numbers, 1, 2, 3, say, and making an infinite list.
1, 2, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, …
You say 2 must appear again … but it doesn’t. If you have finitely many states and infinitely many trials, all you can say for sure is that at least one state must reappear infinitely many times. But any particular state, such as the state that defines “you” or a pink elephant or a galaxy; might appear zero, one, 47, or infinitely many times.
It’s amazing how many otherwise smart people are fooled into thinking that “in an infinite universe, everything must happen.” This is manifestly false." [my emphasis]
Also, consider that the universe is apparently not infinite, which severely limits the chances even more.
Here's another slant on the same subject. As I said, you do have a lot of faith if you believe this is possible...
"The probability of the chance formation of a hypothetical functional ‘simple’ cell, given all the ingredients, is acknowledged2 to be worse than 1 in 1057800. This is a chance of 1 in a number with 57,800 zeros. It would take 11 full pages of magazine type to print this number. To try to put this in perspective, there are about 10 to the power of 80 (a number with 80 zeros) electrons in the universe. Even if every electron in our universe were another universe the same size as ours that would ‘only’ amount to 10160 electrons.
These numbers defy our ability to comprehend their size. Fred Hoyle, British mathematician and astronomer, used analogies to try to convey the immensity of the problem. For example, Hoyle said the probability of the formation of just one of the many proteins on which life depends is comparable to that of the solar system packed full of blind people randomly shuffling Rubik’s cubes all arriving at the solution at the same time3—and this is the chance of getting only one of the 400 or more proteins of the hypothetical minimum cell proposed by the evolutionists (real world ‘simple’ bacteria have about 2,000 proteins and are incredibly complex). [Note added 2013: see update to How simple can life be?] As Hoyle points out, the program of the cell, encoded on the DNA, is also needed. In other words, life could not form by natural (random) processes.
Evolutionists often try to bluff their way out of this problem by using analogies to argue that improbable things happen every day, so why should the naturalistic origin of life be considered impossible? For example, they say the odds of winning the lottery are pretty remote, but someone wins it. Or, the chances of getting the particular arrangement of cards obtained by shuffling a deck is remote, but a rare combination happens every time the cards are shuffled. Or the arrangement of the sand grains in a pile of sand obtained by randomly pouring the sand is extremely complex, but this complex and improbable arrangement did occur as a result of random processes. Or the exact combination and arrangement of people walking across a busy city street is highly improbable, but such improbable arrangements happen all the time. So they argue from these analogies to try to dilute the force of this powerful argument for creation.
You probably realize there is something illogical about this line of argument. But what is it?
In all the analogies cited above, there has to be an outcome. Someone has to win the lottery [note added Feb 2013: even with lotteries where the prize jackpots if no-one gets the exact set of digits drawn, the number of digits to guess is adjusted in line with the number of tickets likely to be purchased to make sure that there will be a winner frequently and there are always lesser prizes for getting less than the full set of digits]. There will be an arrangement of cards. There will be a pile of sand. There will be people walking across the busy street. By contrast, in the processes by which life is supposed to have formed, there need not necessarily be an outcome. Indeed the probabilities argue against any outcome. That is the whole point of the argument. But then the evolutionist may counter that it did happen because we are here! This is circular reasoning at its worst."
Old post, but I don't think that this really got a completely satisfactory reply, so let me explain why the model you're proposing doesn't quite match with evolutionary theory. The monkeys/typewriters/Shakespeare model is a decent analogue for the "random mutation" part of evolutionary theory, but not for the "natural selection" part. In evolutionary theory, mutations which make an organism (or chain of chemicals, or whatever is under evolutionary pressure) less fit for their environment do not get passed down, and mutations which are beneficial do get passed on. Which means that they're kept.
Let me illustrate this by using your "throwing all heads with a fair coin" analogy. Let's make the number smaller than infinity, for the sake of argument. Let's make it an even million. A million heads is what we're trying to throw.
Now, I hope you'll agree that the probability of throwing heads a million times in a row by throwing one fair coin a million times is exactly the same as the probability of throwing heads a million times by throwing a million fair coins once. So that's what we're going to do.
So you throw a million coins and the most likely scenario is that roughly half of them will be heads. Now, if we were following the model you propose, what we'd do is gather them all up and we'd throw them again. But if we're using heads as an analogue for beneficial traits then those heads would actually be kept. So what we do is we leave all the heads where they are and we pick up the roughly half-a-million coins which show tails, and it's those that we throw a second time.
And so on and so on.
To express that as the Shakespeare example, rather than having monkeys typing away on typewriters, we'll have them typing away on computer programs which are similar to word processors. We'll stick with the ground rules that you set out for illustrative purposes - we're trying to replicate When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes and the monkeys are always typing full words (perhaps the program the monkeys are using has a spellchecker that automatically changes the letters to the most similar word).
The first line of the sonnet is the same as the title. If on that first line the monkey types "Fish custard trousers flap cat antidisestablishmentarianism quantum disperate", then the next time s/he comes to type that line, the line will be blank once more. However, if the monkey types "Duo behold contact happening Who and birthday carpet", then the next time s/he comes to type that line the word "and" will already be filled in and after typing the 5th word, the program will skip over to the 7th. If s/he then types "Television train Disgrace bobble serendipity [and] Loquacious Wookie" then the next time s/he comes to type that line both the 3rd and the 6th words will already be filled in.
This is not a perfect analogy for evolution, because it implies movement towards a specific goal, and because traits which were once advantageous can become disadvantageous over time, but as a very simplistic explanation as to why your posts on the improbability of evolution are missing a key point, it'll suffice.
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