In response to the chance origin of life posting, I think that seems
a lot more likely than a randomly picked Mersenne number turning out to
be prime. Follow me here.
The entire Darwinian theory is based on the concept that better
adapted things pass on hereditary information better, more or less.
Consider the monkey-typing-Shakespeare randomly analogy. It is
fantastically improbable that a random assortment of letters will be any
one of the sonnets. However, imagine writing a computer program that
randomly picks a letter, compares it to the nth letter in a given
sonnet, and keeps it if the letter matches but throws it out if it
doesn't match. This vastly improves the odds, and is a much better
approximation to the phenomenon we're trying to explain.
In terms of Mersenne numbers, the probability of protolife arising
from chemical soup isn't of the order of a random Mersenne number being
prime--it's on the order of a Mersenne prime being prime.
My apologies for the off-topic-ness; I tried to tie it back at the
end.
--
Blake Stacey
Executive Director of Programming
HyperSphere Software
[EMAIL PROTECTED] :: http://fly.hiwaay.net/~bstacey
"Think for yourself."
--The Beatles
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