Hoyle's Junkyard, Kepler's Wife, & Monkeys

[Khandro]

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' ?

[Khandro]

I think Fred would have been better to have chosen a simpler analogy like Kepler's wife's salad, he was surely choosing an outrageous example for dramatic effect, and many of his poe-faced detractors don't do poetics. If he had chosen a bicycle or even a tin-opener there perhaps would not have been such a furore, and Heathfield, I think Hoyle is a more reliable scientific source than Richard Dawkins, of whom it is frequently said, isn't a real scientist anyway.

[LazyGun]

Ahh, so we should excuse his fallacy because it was poetic! And of course, any detractors of the analogy are poe-faced- they fail to interpret the majesty and the true meaning, because they are incapable of recognising poetry!

Your usual hand-waving woo defence, but thanks for the clarification, Khandro.

How is Keplers wifes' salad a better analogy? Please expound.....

You claim that it is frequently said of Richard Dawkins that he isn't a real scientist- who says that then? where and how frequently?

What yardstick is being applied that allows for Fred Hoyle, Astronomer, to be a more expert, more scientific authority on the process of evolution than
Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biology, one time professor of zoology etc?

Come to that, what is your definition of a scientist, Khandro, and how does it differ between Hoyle and Dawkins?

You defend Hoyles Fallacy because it fits your view of how the universe should be, and reject Dawkins because he is a nasty militant atheist.

[jomifl]

Khandro, clearly you do not understand what science is.

[heathfield]

History is filled with the names of the self-taught who have queried the claims of "reliable scientific sources", and who have been proved to be right. "Nothing overshadows truth so much as authority". If your authority is Hoyle, so be it.

[jim360]

Of course once you mentioned the walking into a brick wall and passing through it, I just had to go through the calculation. My assumptions are such that there's a lot of error associated with this calculation, but even so I estimate that the probability of a single electron passing through a metre-thick wall made of oxygen (it's mostly clay with a lot of silicon tetra-oxide so I think I can make this claim), if the electron is part of a man running towards the wall at 10 metres per second, is in the order of

(4/9)*10^-[4*10^(29)+48]*4^-[2*10^29]

I can't even begin to explain how small this number is. And of course that is for just a single electron. If a human body is mostly water then an average human would have about 3*10^28 electrons all of which must pass through the wall simultaneously, so we multiply my earlier result by itself 3*10^28 times. The resulting number is then so pathetically small that it is essentially meaningless, so that in fact we can take it to be zero and state that in fact there is no theoretical chance whatsoever that a human can spontaneously pass through a wall. Or at least you would need an infinity of humans for an infinity of time to even have a chance you could write down. Anyway, sorry for that aside.

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It should be stated that chakka is , I believe, technically wrong when he says that "an infinite number of attempts will produce" whatever you are looking for, however rare. A typewrite producing random type could in theory just go AAAAA... forever and therefore never type out Shakespeare.

I've said earlier why I think Hoyle (and Kepler) have both given wrong analogies. We know far too little about the origins of both life and complex life for their analogies to have any meaning.

[jim360]

Incidentally, my number obtained while finite is in fact an upper bound. A human could only pass through a wall like this if he stayed the same human on the other side. My calculation has assumed that all of the electrons in the human are separate objects, but of course they are not, so this squeezes the number even further and in fact will make it exactly zero. So there is NO chance that a human can pass through a wall, even if you had every possible human that could ever have existed running at walls for ever and ever.

[LankyLanky]

Dawkins : 'The Selfish Gene' explains in more detail. The building blocks of life have been abundant on this planet for 4 billion years. Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen. In chemistry, as in physics and biology, things find their most stable state. One of the organic steady states is the group of chemicals known as amino acids. So for 'life' to exist, all that was then needed was a replicator. Given 4 billion years for the correct combination of amino acids and organic bases to occur, thus forming a strand of nucleic acid capable of replication, it would have been remarkable for life not have arisen. In 4 billion years all sorts of events become certainties. If you live that long you'll win the lottery over 1,000,000 times. Anything that can happen will happen !

[jim360]

Nothing becomes a certainty if it can happen. There is a chance that you will never win the lottery, ever. So "anything that can happen will happen" is false. "Anything that can happen will almost certainly happen, but may still not" is closer to the truth.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem#Almost_surely

[LankyLanky]

You missed the point Jim. Given odds of say 1,000,000 to 1 against the chance organisation of a few simple, stable molecules into one larger molecule capable of replication, then the probability of that event happening at least once in 4,000,000,000 years is to all intents and purposes equal to 1. My last sentence was a paraphrase to a well-known recent title on the topic of the quantum universe.

But my reference to nucleic acid should also be explained. Why nucleic acid, when its first appearance was freeform, unbound by a cell membrane. The answer there lies in that as soon as one replicating machine had arisen, the mutational and evolutionary process had begun. In order to compete against ever more sophisticate versions of the same genus, the most successful nucleic acids created a protective shield around themselves, the cell membrane, thus making it more difficult for competing nucleic chains to absorb them into their own processes. Life was well and truly on its way. From there, the evolution of creatures using the highly sophisticated molecule haemoglobin was also, I'm afraid to say Jim - again given the time available - a certainty.

[Khandro]

jomifl; Your hubris never ends, you have said time and time again; //Khandro, clearly you do not understand what science is.// It is now time that you tell us exactly what YOU think science is, and what are its boundaries?

[LankyLanky]

Hoyle, well known for his ideas on stellar nucleosynthesis and controversially for his insistence on a 'steady-state' universe, is lesser known for his help in setting up DAMTP at Cambridge in 1958/9. Prior to that time theoretical physicists had a hard time getting anywhere at Cambridge to meet or hold seminars. Hoyle, at that time mathematics professor at Cambridge, took part in meetings with Batchelor, Eden and Hamilton which resulted in approval of DAMTP by the central university committees in 1959. Batchelor was appointed the first Head of Department, but he was by no means the only contributor to DAMTP's foundation.

[LazyGun]

Whist interesting, Lanky - how is that information relevant to the OP and the rest of the discussion?

[Khandro]

LG; re. why isn't Dawkins a real scientist and who says so? well for starters; "After reading a great deal of this bombast, I have come to the conclusion that Richard has never assumed the duties of a Professor of the Public Understanding of Science - a position he holds due to the patronage of a zillionaire from Microsoft. He seems to lack the intellectual confidence to say anything of substance, so he sticks to the very safe path of appealing to materialist prejudices."
Philip Johnson, (Philip Johnson is a former Law professor at Harvard University, who authored the book, Darwin on Trial.)


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[LazyGun]

What, you mean the very same Phillip Johnson who was the inventor of the wedge theory and intelligent design?

So you think a lawyers opinion, a non-scientist and one who is vehemently opposed to the whole idea of evolution, the one who is credited with the formation of Intelligent Design, that ridiculous pseudo-scientific theory designed to give a fig leaf of credibility to Creationism and shoehorn it into science lessons; That this guy is a credible and authoratitive arbiter of Dawkins scientific worth?

You do know how to weigh up evidence for its impartiality and relative reliability, right?

Johnson is a hopelessly biased witness; not someone credible as an authority of Dawkins credentials, and not qualified to offer an authoratitive opinion.

So- who else you got?

[jim360]

Lanky, an event that has probability equal to one is not necessarily a certainty when there is an infinity of possible outcomes. This is because the probability distribution becomes continuous so any single event that can still happen has probability zero.

That's a technical point but an important one. I might earlier have agreed with statements like "given an infinite time anything and everything will happen" but I was wrong to, and people are wrong to say this. What it does mean though is that in the context of life, and complex life, emerging, you have to understand what other outcomes are possible before you can make any statements like Hoyle's. Since we don't know enough about this, Hoyle's statement is I have said before not a valid argument.

[Khandro]

LG; I see, Harvard professors are not up to your exacting standards, well let's try Oxford, - a real professor not a Mickey Mouse one like Dawkins was; "Dawkins seems to think that saying something more loudly and confidently, while ignoring or trivializing counter-evidence, will persuade the open-minded that religious belief is a type of delusion. For the gullible and credulous, it is the confidence with which something is said that persuades, rather than the evidence offered in its support. Dawkins' astonishingly superficial and inaccurate portrayal of Christianity will simply lead Christians to conclude that he does not know what he is talking about -- and that his atheism may therefore rest on a series of errors and misunderstandings. Ironically the ultimate achievement of The God Delusion for modern atheism may be to suggest that it is actually atheism itself may be a delusion about God. "

Alister McGrath, "The Dawkins Delusion," AlterNet. (31 July, 2008).

Alister McGrath is a biochemist and Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University.

[jim360]

Dawkins is a bit too aggressive for my liking and full of snide comments such as "people are entitled to believe whatever fairy tales they want to" or such like. But I don't need his authority to reach my decisions, and the case I am building against your decision is my own. Try not to focus on the man, Khandro.

[Khandro]

jim; I've no wish to discuss the man at all, it's just that others insist on producing him as if he was an authority on the subject.

[jim360]

Well he probably is. Being an evolutionary biologist and all.

[Khandro]

^ OK, I accept he has his right to an opinion.