Norm Weatherby spends considerable energy repeating the argument from improbability so beloved by creationists and ID/IOTheorists everywhere.
The probability of life having originated through random choice at any one of the 1046 occasions is then about 10-255. The smallness of this number means that it is virtually impossible that life has originated by a random association of molecules. The proposition that a living structure could have arisen in a single event through random association of molecules must be rejected. [Quastler, Henry. The Emergence of Biological Organization, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1964, p. 7.]"
I've taken the liberty of adding <sup> </sup> tags to turn what looks like fairly small numbers to the superscripted numbers that were intended. I've also highlighted the critical words in the quote– words that were not paid enough attention, in my opinion.
To get a cell by chance would require at least one hundred functional proteins to appear simultaneously in one place. That is one hundred simultaneous events each of an independent probability which could hardly be more than 10-20 giving maximum combined probability of 10(-2000.) [Denten, Michael. Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Warwickshire, Burnett Books Limited, 1985]
And finally
The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer. [R. Dawkins, "The Necessity of Darwinism". New Scientist, Vol. 94, April 15, 1982, p. 130.]
Again, I've highlighted a word that needs to be paid more careful attention.
It's interesting that the last quote is the one from Richard Dawkins. This is a wonderful example of "quote mining", which seems to be the only sort of research Creationists and Intelligent Design theorists actually do. They love to find a quote by someone involved in science that makes it sound like they believe in special creation or at least intelligent fiddling. And it's one of my main reasons for viewing any quotes that are presented by advocates of Creationism or Intelligent Design with an extremely jaundiced eye.
Here's the rest of the Dawkins quote:
The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less can we believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer. But Charles Darwin showed how it is possible for blind physical forces to mimic the effects of conscious design, and, by operating as a cumulative filter of chance variations, to lead eventual to organized and adaptive complexity, to mosquitoes and mammoths, to humans and therefore, indirectly, to books and computers. Darwin's theory is now supported by all the available relevant evidence, and its truth is not doubted by any serious modern biologist...
Dawkins makes the same point in his book The Blind Watchmaker, and explains the mechanism by which these improbable things can happen, and do happen, even in the lab.
The point is, no one who accepts evolution believes modern living things arose de novo in one step as a multitude of disparate parts flew together. Whatever the first living things were – and to some extent, this depends on where we draw the line between "life" and "non-life" – the life we have on hand for examination is billions of generations removed from these ancestral forms.
The statistical arguments, even taken at face value, are flawed because they calculate the denominator of the fraction that expresses the odds that any given thing will happen. They fail because they don't calculate the numerator.
One brief example: My chromosomes are arranged in 23 pairs, for a total of 46 chromosomes. Each of those 46 chromosomes was donated by one or the other of my parents, and each one had a 50% chance of being the one of the corresponding pair that was selected. That is, each chromosome could, had the coin toss gone the other way, have been replaced by the other member of the pair.
The probability that my genetic makeup would have been what it actually turned out to be is easy to calculate. Each cromosome had a 50% chance of being selected. Any pair of chromosomes, each with a 50% chance of being selected, has a total probability of 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25.
Multiplying 46 probabilities of 50% gives us a result of 1.42e-14, or one in a little over 70 trillion. That's more than 11,000 times the current population of the Earth, and probably at least 5000 times the number of humans who have ever lived.
By that calculation, my existence is so improbable that some entity must have tweaked the laws of probability in my favor.
I am obviously the focus of this designer's grand plan for the universe. Just one more reason for you to read and link to my blog!
Ah, the fun we can have, if we merely leave off the numerator on the odds ratio.
Of course, the trick in this calculation is that a large number of the possible selections of chromosomes would have produced a living person. Roll the dice again, and my parents would have been very unlikely to have produced me, but they were very likely to have produced some offspring.
In another simple example, let's take a cup of water.
Run an electric current through it and break the water into its component hydrogen and oxygen.
Mix the hydrogen and oxygen in a bottle and add a spark.
Assuming the bottle is sturdy enough, you'll have an explosion, and all the hydrogen and oxygen will have combined to form water.
Every molecule of water is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Even if we restrict the combinations to clusters of three atoms, we have a number of possibilities:
HHH, HHO, HOH, OHH, HOO, OHO, OOH, and OOO.
We'll wind up with hydrogen atoms outnumbering oxygen atoms 2:1, so this will affect the odds. If we have three atoms, there are three possible ways they can combine at random: two of HHO and one HOH.
With 20 hydrogen atoms and 10 oxygens, the number of possibilities increase.
I won't go through the calculations, because it's late and I'm tired. I'll merely point out that the number of molecules of water in a cup is about 7.9e24 or 7.9 trillion trillion. The odds against all, or even the vast majority we see, of the molecules turning out to be H-O-H are astronomical. Obviously, when we see hydrogen and oxygen combining to form any significant quantities of water, we're seeing the result of intelligent tinkering with the system.
Well, maybe we're seeing the result of a system constrained by physical laws I haven't mentioned until just now.
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