> 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.
The methodology you described includes a fatal flaw because, by introducing
an outside force, you've just removed the randomness.
In the monkey experiment, you have the end product, the Shakespeare sonnet,
and an intelligent force of some sort, the computer, matching the random
results to the desired end product.
Is there some outside force that is overseeing the random throwing together
of amino-acids to produce proteins? If so, it's not a very random
process...in fact it's not an accidental process at all. An outside,
intelligent force is guiding it, which is *exactly* the point that
abiogenesis tries to *avoid*. :-)
Besides, I wouldn't even argue about evolution since it's too touchy. We
all have our opinions on that, and I'd just as soon let those be. But how
the very *first* amino acids, proteins, or cells came about is something
else. You can't build a cell by natural selection, or any other
"stair-stepping" process. You either get it *all* right, or it's all wrong.
Trying to get back OT, there are 37 known Mersenne Primes below 2^3021377-1.
How many "potential" primes are there, i.e. how many exponents between 2 and
3021377 are prime? Darn, I can't find that...
Well, there's 100,008 primes up to 1,299,827 and there's 34 Mersenne Primes
in that exponent range.
Therefore, if we pick a Mersenne number at random, we have 34 chances in
~1.3*10^6 of picking a Mersenne prime. Those are even better odds than
winning the lottery (6 numbers from 1-50 giving about a 1 in 11.44 billion
chance in any order).
On the other hand, try the odds of flipping a coin 450 times in succession
and getting heads each time. 1 in 2^450 is a zero chance.
And I haven't even brought up, as I did in an email, the fact that proteins
consist of *only* left-handed amino acids, whereas amino-acids produces in
lab experiments contain equal amounts of left- and right-handed ones.
What's the odds of a protein containing 450 only-left-handed amino acids
now? Even more ridiculously small.
Now, what are the odds of enough of these amazingly rare proteins existing
close enough to each other and magically combining to form a
self-replicating cell? Even more staggeringly impossible.
Given all the obstacles to a single protein forming, much less a single
cell, I'm amazed that they still teach this stuff to kids in school without
even trying to explain just how such a miracle happened. The only
explanation you'll get from anyone is that there was a primordial soup, got
hit by lightning or some such, and boom, life.
The Nova show on the subject went on to explain that this first cell
promptly started to feed on bacteria. Whoa! Where'd this bacteria come
from? Like before the first cell formed, bacteria had already managed to
put itself together too? The book "Darwin's Black Box" by Behe certainly
shows that a bacterium is no simple machine either.
I'm seriously OT now...I promise...no more! :-)
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