ChatterBank1 min ago
Hoyle's Junkyard, Kepler's Wife, & Monkeys
Mention Fred Hoyle's 'Chances of a tornado in a junkyard producing a 747' analogy, to the creation of the universe, the knee-jerk reaction (at least on AB in R&S) is to quote 'Hoyle's Fallacy', which is based largely on semantics. As an artist (with an interest in science) I stick with Fred, and recently it appears more scientists begin to concur.
In the book 'Leviathan and the Air-Pump' (Princeton University Press) I discover this quotation from [one of my heroes] Johannes Kepler in his 'Stella nova' (1606) about his redoubtable wife;
'Yesterday, when I had grown tired of writing and my mind was full of dust motes from thinking about atoms, she called me to dinner and served me a salad. Whereupon I said to her, if one were to throw into the air the pewter plates, lettuce leaves, grains of salt, drops of oil, vinegar and water and the glorious eggs, and all these things were to remain there for eternity, then would one day this salad just fall together by chance? My beauty replied "But not in this presentation, nor in this order". '
Does the Hoyle/Mrs Kepler argument put paid to the 'Infinite monkey theorem' ?
In the book 'Leviathan and the Air-Pump' (Princeton University Press) I discover this quotation from [one of my heroes] Johannes Kepler in his 'Stella nova' (1606) about his redoubtable wife;
'Yesterday, when I had grown tired of writing and my mind was full of dust motes from thinking about atoms, she called me to dinner and served me a salad. Whereupon I said to her, if one were to throw into the air the pewter plates, lettuce leaves, grains of salt, drops of oil, vinegar and water and the glorious eggs, and all these things were to remain there for eternity, then would one day this salad just fall together by chance? My beauty replied "But not in this presentation, nor in this order". '
Does the Hoyle/Mrs Kepler argument put paid to the 'Infinite monkey theorem' ?
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No this is nonsense
We have nowhere near enough knowledge about how life started to even begin to come up with a probability - such a figure is based on so many assumptions it's simply meaningless.
For example DNA is not required - simpler RNA underpins simpler life forms - still simpler forms may have preceded that which are no longer with us
That would hugely affect Hoyles calculation
An analogy - suppose humans were wiped out and the only engines preserved were 21st century ones -No steam enines no early combution engines.
An alien Fred Hoyle might suggest some great genius had assembled a BMW 5 series turbo diesel in one go from scratch
We simply don't have an acheological record of early life in the way that we do later ones.
We don't know if simple sulphur based life came first or what the simplest possible life form is.
You're not looking for a hurricane assembling a 747
You're looking for a hurricane assembling 'something aerodynamic'
We have nowhere near enough knowledge about how life started to even begin to come up with a probability - such a figure is based on so many assumptions it's simply meaningless.
For example DNA is not required - simpler RNA underpins simpler life forms - still simpler forms may have preceded that which are no longer with us
That would hugely affect Hoyles calculation
An analogy - suppose humans were wiped out and the only engines preserved were 21st century ones -No steam enines no early combution engines.
An alien Fred Hoyle might suggest some great genius had assembled a BMW 5 series turbo diesel in one go from scratch
We simply don't have an acheological record of early life in the way that we do later ones.
We don't know if simple sulphur based life came first or what the simplest possible life form is.
You're not looking for a hurricane assembling a 747
You're looking for a hurricane assembling 'something aerodynamic'
Why is mentioning Hoyles Fallacy considered a knee-jerk response? Those who examined Freds argument and found it severely lacking considered the proposition carefully and pointed out the problems with his analogy, which was not "largely semantics" at all. It was a fundamental misperception of evolution on his part.
First and foremost - it is a flawed analogy, because you are comparing organic life, capable of reproduction, and change over time with an inanimate entity.
Hoyles statement, on the chances of complex life arising through evolution, was.
"The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein."
Organic life can reproduce and change to become more complex over time; inanimate components of something like a 747 cannot.
Its really quite a poor analogy to draw.Nor does quoting Kepler, or the infinite monkey proposition make it any stronger...
First and foremost - it is a flawed analogy, because you are comparing organic life, capable of reproduction, and change over time with an inanimate entity.
Hoyles statement, on the chances of complex life arising through evolution, was.
"The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein."
Organic life can reproduce and change to become more complex over time; inanimate components of something like a 747 cannot.
Its really quite a poor analogy to draw.Nor does quoting Kepler, or the infinite monkey proposition make it any stronger...
Another thing worth considering is that even if the chance of life emerging appears to be vanishingly small, you still have to work out the probability of life NOT emerging. It's not necessarily as simple as one minus your first answer, because there may be other possibilities, e.g. life of a different type from our own emerging and so on.
It's related loosely, I think, to the chain of thought "the chances of the death of so-and-so being an accident are tiny, so it can't have been an accident, so it was murder" - you have to subject the alternative to equal scrutiny. In the past this fallacy has had horrible consequences of false convictions.
Returning to the case of life emerging - since we know little about the origins of life still it's wrong to assume that the chances of life emerging are so tiny. Maybe life is not that unlikely after all, since in general we see that wherever life might conceivably emerge, it does - and sometimes too we find life in places that were not thought even remotely habitable. My gut feeling is that the chances of life emerging are far higher than Hoyle thought - but it's just a feeling so who knows?
It's related loosely, I think, to the chain of thought "the chances of the death of so-and-so being an accident are tiny, so it can't have been an accident, so it was murder" - you have to subject the alternative to equal scrutiny. In the past this fallacy has had horrible consequences of false convictions.
Returning to the case of life emerging - since we know little about the origins of life still it's wrong to assume that the chances of life emerging are so tiny. Maybe life is not that unlikely after all, since in general we see that wherever life might conceivably emerge, it does - and sometimes too we find life in places that were not thought even remotely habitable. My gut feeling is that the chances of life emerging are far higher than Hoyle thought - but it's just a feeling so who knows?
Well for me at least it means that any conclusions you reach, while perhaps logically sound (and I'd debate even that in this case!) are based on very uncertain foundations. "Life is perhaps extremely unlikely, comparable with this thing, therefore it surely cannot have happened by chance," or whatever conclusion it is you are reaching - and that's clearly what Hoyle and Kepler have in mind - but we don't know for certain one way or another the first fact.
Never mind the issue that both Hoyle and Kepler aren't really comparing like with like. Planes and salads have yet to appear by natural processes, and never will - whereas life is a natural process. What that distinction means isn't obvious, though I think it will have to do with things such as energy and entropy. But anyway the entire argument becomes flawed on these grounds:
1) We do not know that the probability of life emerging spontaneously is vanishingly small;
2) We can not compare natural processes with man-made processes.
Never mind the issue that both Hoyle and Kepler aren't really comparing like with like. Planes and salads have yet to appear by natural processes, and never will - whereas life is a natural process. What that distinction means isn't obvious, though I think it will have to do with things such as energy and entropy. But anyway the entire argument becomes flawed on these grounds:
1) We do not know that the probability of life emerging spontaneously is vanishingly small;
2) We can not compare natural processes with man-made processes.
It's not necessarily a problem if you look for evidence to support preconceptions. What does matter is what you do when you can't find any. Do you carry on looking for evidence and start "finding" it even though it's not there? Or do you reject the preconception?
It also depends how you arrived at the preconception - is it a theory that has good reasons behind it (e.g. mathematically sound, makes sense of previous results), or is it just speculation without experimental or mathematical backing? Such speculations can be correct - some Ancient Greeks invented the concept of an "atom" and used it to explain what we now call Brownian motion some 2,000 years before Robert Brown made his observation! [see Lucretius, "On the Nature of Things", Book II.]. But they mostly aren't - that same Lucretius gets it wrong in most other ways.
It also depends how you arrived at the preconception - is it a theory that has good reasons behind it (e.g. mathematically sound, makes sense of previous results), or is it just speculation without experimental or mathematical backing? Such speculations can be correct - some Ancient Greeks invented the concept of an "atom" and used it to explain what we now call Brownian motion some 2,000 years before Robert Brown made his observation! [see Lucretius, "On the Nature of Things", Book II.]. But they mostly aren't - that same Lucretius gets it wrong in most other ways.
I think that's what Hoyle was driving at surely? The chance of life emerging is so small that it is comparable to the probability of a jet plane forming spontaneously.
I'm actually more inclined in the other direction, that the chances of life emerging are relatively high given the right circumstances, but I don't have much evidence to support this.
I'm actually more inclined in the other direction, that the chances of life emerging are relatively high given the right circumstances, but I don't have much evidence to support this.
Hoyle was not talking about the origin of life but about the emergence of higher forms of life. He was rejecting evolution using that old fallacy that complex life came about by chance. It didn't. The mutations are random but which mutations survive and flourish are determined by natural selection, in which chance plays no part at all.
If you allow an infinite amount of time then anything can happen no matter what the odds against it are. Those monkeys (much better to produce random letters and punctuation by computer) would not only produce Hamlet but all of Shakespeare's plays, all of Dickens, all of everything that has ever been written and produce them all an infinite number of times. But none of this helps when discussing practical matters.
If you allow an infinite amount of time then anything can happen no matter what the odds against it are. Those monkeys (much better to produce random letters and punctuation by computer) would not only produce Hamlet but all of Shakespeare's plays, all of Dickens, all of everything that has ever been written and produce them all an infinite number of times. But none of this helps when discussing practical matters.
The only things that can happen in an infinite amount of time are those things with probability greater than zero. I don't believe that monkeys with a typewrite could really produce Shakespeare because as that experiment shows Monkeys aren't going to use it to type! Better to just consider a computer printing out a random string of characters (how about just the 26 letters ignoring punctuation to keep things relatively simple), when you can estimate the time needed for a typical Shakespeare play to be produced. I can't do the calculation myself but anyway the answer is finite.
jim360 - It is because people get distracted by the practicalities of the monkeys and the typewriters (whereas they were intended only as a means of making a point) that I suggested a computer with random generation of letters and punctuation. Why do you omit the latter?
It doesn't matter how low the probability is of random generation producing something meaningful, an infinite number of attempts will produce it.
It doesn't matter how low the probability is of random generation producing something meaningful, an infinite number of attempts will produce it.
This argument is reducing to a quantitative argument, about probabilities.
It is more profound than that; Hoyles analogy was fundamentally flawed, a qualitative misperception equating the development of complex organisms with the design and construction of a complex inanimate mechanism. Its not really much more than a re-interpretation of Paleys teleological argument, the watchmaker argument.
organic life is able to change and self-replicate and pass on those changes over time to form more complex organisms. Comparing that process to a single, tumultous and chaotic event, a tornado, from which formed an incredibly complex machine out of randomly available inanimate objects is simply absurd.
Its a poor analogy, a fallacy. Chance and probability are a distant secondary consideration....
It is more profound than that; Hoyles analogy was fundamentally flawed, a qualitative misperception equating the development of complex organisms with the design and construction of a complex inanimate mechanism. Its not really much more than a re-interpretation of Paleys teleological argument, the watchmaker argument.
organic life is able to change and self-replicate and pass on those changes over time to form more complex organisms. Comparing that process to a single, tumultous and chaotic event, a tornado, from which formed an incredibly complex machine out of randomly available inanimate objects is simply absurd.
Its a poor analogy, a fallacy. Chance and probability are a distant secondary consideration....
Hoyle's argument is clearly refuted in Richard Dawkins book 'The Blind Watchmaker'. A watch, (or a 747), is the result of careful planning and construction down to the smallest detail. Dawkins shows that life, in its many present forms, is the result of an infiniite number of random occurrences from its very beginnings all the way through millions of years of evolution...
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