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Fortunately, there are millions capable of completing the mission. If the odds of pregnancy were anywhere near that high we would probably not exist any longer. As for which sperm was me, the answer is "all of them." Each of them carried the building blocks for my existence. I didn't develop a consciousness until much later.
Fortunately, there are millions capable of completing the mission. If the odds of pregnancy were anywhere near that high we would probably not exist any longer. As for which sperm was me, the answer is "all of them." Each of them carried the building blocks for my existence. I didn't develop a consciousness until much later.
The odds in lotteries are engineered.What's fascinating about this is that this is almost precisely the refutation made against creationists who claim that abiogenesis is impossible given the odds. This is the lottery example - the odds of any one person winning the lottery may be 1 in 300 million, but if 300 million people buy lottery tickets the odds that *someone* out of that group will win are pretty high.
The odds in lotteries are engineered.
That doesn't even make sense.
All it does is dish out less than it has earned. The winners come out with much more than they paid.
It actually does make sense if you look at it from the perspective of it's purpose (profit), and the fact that the lottery is 'engineered' to make them money.
The only statistically guaranteed "winner" in the lottery is the creator of the lottery.
That assumes that the payout is less than the money taken in on the sale of the tickets. It has nothing to do with the probability of the lottery itself.
I didn't really intend to nitpick about it. His statement just made sense to me from that perspective at least. It is engineer to make the lottery money no matter who 'else' might be a winner.
The "It" in the last sentence is not the probability of the lottery. They could take out half the potential numbers in the lottery and their profit could stay the same. That is why "engineered probabilities" makes no sense. It is the ticket prices and payouts that are engineered, not the probabilities.
As you wish.I hear you in terms of verbiage, but it seemed pretty obvious what he meant.
But even in that sense it does not refute anything. Of course lotteries are engineered to make money. That does not change the underlying statistics of it.
As you wish.I hear you in terms of verbiage, but it seemed pretty obvious what he meant.
I thought it was, too, but I guess for some folks it wasn't. Here it is:As you wish.I hear you in terms of verbiage, but it seemed pretty obvious what he meant.
...This is the lottery example - the odds of any one person winning the lottery may be 1 in 300 million, but if 300 million people buy lottery tickets the odds that *someone* out of that group will win are pretty high.
I thought RealityCheck's example wasn't a good one because lotteries are engineered and the outcomes are statistically predictable. Abiogenesis is not engineered, and if a positive outcome is statistically predictable at all, it's remote because the boundaries of the selection space are the age of the universe and the number of atoms contained within it. You can't just "add more people" and make a positive outcome more likely; we've already estimated the age of the universe and the number of atoms it contains.The odds in lotteries are engineered.
I thought RealityCheck's example wasn't a good one because lotteries are engineered and the outcomes are statistically predictable.
Abiogenesis is not engineered, and if a positive outcome is statistically predictable at all, it's remote because the boundaries of the selection space are the age of the universe and the number of atoms contained within it. You can't just "add more people" and make a positive outcome more likely; we've already estimated the age of the universe and the number of atoms it contains.
Hope that clears things up.
How many possible positive outcomes are there? How many different combinations of atoms can result in life coming from non-life in nature?
We would also have to factor in things like temperature and various other environmental possibilities. It's not just the atoms within the organism itself that have to be arranged just right, but also the environment itself, including relative stability. I'm not sure how one would even begin to go about computing such odds.
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