- #1
lbooda
The article under the above name, by John Rennie in the July 2002 Scientific American, has 14 other reasons than the one I wish to illustrate:[Creationist] "8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance."[Rennie, condensed] "As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence "TOBEORNOTTOBE." Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomlywhile preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed(in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days."This seems most logical and parsimonious to me. See SciAm to post your favorite "answer."A wake to imagination! {^,^}