The statement is commonly made by anti-evolutionists that evolution is simply "chance", or they attempt to use an analogy to show that the development of humans is so improbable that the Theory of Evolution is worthless. However, all of these analogies are flawed in a basic way.
Let's consider two challenges that will serve to illustrate the mathematics of the probability involved. This may seem like a mere semantic difference but it's critical.
The first challenge is to roll 100 dice until all of them come up 1's. Each time you roll you must reroll all 100 dice. The probability of this occuring is 1 in 6.5 x 10^77. A computer that could do 1 billion trials per second (which I believe is more than any current computer can do) would take 1.2 x 10^66 (which means 1.2 plus 66 zeroes) *years* to complete this.
The second challenge is to roll 100 dice until all of them come up 1's. However, this time, after each roll, you may pick out the dice that show 1's and not reroll them the next time. So the pool of dice you are rolling will become smaller and smaller until all of them are 1's. This produces the same results as the first challenge, but is much faster -- you could probably do that yourself in 15 minutes or less, and a computer would probably take less than a second to do this.
Creationists always compare evolution to the first challenge when they are discussing how improbable life is. They often compare it to a monkey hammering on a typewriter and trying to produce a play, or wind randomly wearing away at rock to produce the Mount Rushmore carvings.
However, Natural Selection does not start from the beginning with each new generation. The essence of natural selection is that the gains are preserved and the mistakes are eradicated. This makes evolution much closer to the second challenge than the first. And that makes a huge difference, 1 second versus a number of years much larger than the projected life of the universe.
You may not agree with evolution, but there's no point in trying to use an argument against it that is so clearly wrong.
-Chris
Let's consider two challenges that will serve to illustrate the mathematics of the probability involved. This may seem like a mere semantic difference but it's critical.
The first challenge is to roll 100 dice until all of them come up 1's. Each time you roll you must reroll all 100 dice. The probability of this occuring is 1 in 6.5 x 10^77. A computer that could do 1 billion trials per second (which I believe is more than any current computer can do) would take 1.2 x 10^66 (which means 1.2 plus 66 zeroes) *years* to complete this.
The second challenge is to roll 100 dice until all of them come up 1's. However, this time, after each roll, you may pick out the dice that show 1's and not reroll them the next time. So the pool of dice you are rolling will become smaller and smaller until all of them are 1's. This produces the same results as the first challenge, but is much faster -- you could probably do that yourself in 15 minutes or less, and a computer would probably take less than a second to do this.
Creationists always compare evolution to the first challenge when they are discussing how improbable life is. They often compare it to a monkey hammering on a typewriter and trying to produce a play, or wind randomly wearing away at rock to produce the Mount Rushmore carvings.
However, Natural Selection does not start from the beginning with each new generation. The essence of natural selection is that the gains are preserved and the mistakes are eradicated. This makes evolution much closer to the second challenge than the first. And that makes a huge difference, 1 second versus a number of years much larger than the projected life of the universe.
You may not agree with evolution, but there's no point in trying to use an argument against it that is so clearly wrong.
-Chris
