Our beautiful planet

[rov1200]

Did God create the wonders of nature for our benefit? If not for whom? It is well known fact that the colour of flowers is to attract bees and insects that use the pollen. Some deep sea fish and creatures were never intended for us to see at all.

[rov1200]

Squad this extract from an article last year explains Zipf's law quite concisely when it comes to human genetics:

Molecular biologists have discovered that the DNA code and human language are not only comparable; they follow an identical pattern. Computer programs specialized to obtain information through a process of dividing the genome sequence into millions of parts, distinguish the mini-sequences as “words” of a big encyclopedia. Through subjecting these “words” to Zipf’s Law, known in linguistics as the governing principle behind the totality of human languages (from Chinese to English), scientists were dumbfounded to discover that the genetic code followed the same law.

Zipf’s Law states that in any text, be it a book or an article, the most repeated word will appear many more times than the second most repeated, which itself will be repeated many more times than the third most repeated, and so on successively. The genetic code appears to follow the same law, which for many is the greatest indication of a higher intelligence.

Therefore if you believe in a God or supreme being his language is written in the genes.

[naomi24]

The religious attribute the creation of the universe to 'God', but if they'd actually read the Bible with an unfettered mind, they would be well aware that he wasn't quite as brilliant as they make him out to be. He wasn't omniscient, he wasn't omnipresent, and, therefore, it follows that he wasn't omnipotent. If the universe was 'created', it wasn't him what dunnit!

[mibn2cweus]

Good point Naomi. I cweusly doubt that a god as thick as the one described in the Bible would even have the intelligence required to write a book . . . not even one that abysmal.

[jake-the-peg]

Beso's point about the billions of stars and only lottery winners getting to observe the draw is a good one and refers to something called the Antropic principle.

However it is limited.

There are indeed billions of stars but there is only one Universe - Only one speed of light in a vacuum, only one Gravitational constant, electronic charge, Plancks constant. Yet all these values come together to form a Universe capable of supporting stable matter, of stars of chemistry that can support life.

This is why some people have postulated that there must be other Universes where these are different but we have no other evidence for this.

I am suspicious of empirical laws like Zipfs law. The reason is that where you see it it becomes remarkable. Where you don't see it it is ignored.

Statistics are very good at tricking us. Some things are much more probable than we expect. Like the probability of two people in a group having the same birthday. Or the famous Monty Hall problem where it's better to switch doors ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_hall_problem )

I suspect that Zipfs law is much like this, that really it only seems remarkable to us because we lack a good enough understanding of the statistics involved.

A similar principle is Benfords law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law which says that in any list of data (most commonly from the real world) the number 1 appears most commonly