[tortoise]

The probability of things evolving into the incredible degree of complexity we see on earth around us are more than astronomical.

If and only if the probability distribution is isotropic or nearly isotropic.

Unfortunately, out here in the real world, the probability distribution is extremely anisotropic which makes the applicability of a model based on isotropic probability distributions pretty questionable. The probability distribution of the molecular conformation phase space is extremely biased and irregular, though many creationists/ID-ists pretend otherwise for the sake of their argument.

If the probability distribution was not highly irregular, industrial chemical synthesis would not be possible.

[Cicero]

Yes, I did quite a bit of math before I went on to other things, and I understand statistics reasonably well.

But you are talking about millions of orders of magnitude here, if not billions.

It is sometimes said that, given enough time, a room full of monkeys could create all the works of Shakespeare. Wrong. As this author points out:

"Lest anyone imagine a lot can be accomplished by single random mutations, note that if a billion animals each typed one random character per second throughout the Earth's 4.5 billion year history, there is virtually no chance any one of them would duplicate a given 20-character string.)"

In other words, a billion animals over the entire history of earth would be hard put to recreate a single line of Shakespeare.

[editor-surveyor]

"Unfortunately, out here in the real world, the probability distribution is extremely anisotropic which makes the applicability of a model based on isotropic probability distributions pretty questionable. The probability distribution of the molecular conformation phase space is extremely biased and irregular, though many creationists/ID-ists pretend otherwise for the sake of their argument."

A giant crock of baffle-gab!!!

I thought only Iche-brother could concoct such obliquely directed irrelevance. How is you Disgronificator doing today? Your muffler bearings are in from Haiti Scientific, whenever you'd like to pick them up.

[Age of Reason]

Isn't complexity really subjective?

What we habitually consider complex are those things that are arranged to our values.

In an objective sense, it may be that a desktop PC is no more ordered, no more complex, than a cloud of gas.

[johnnyb_61820]

"The probability distribution of the molecular conformation phase space is extremely biased and irregular, though many creationists/ID-ists pretend otherwise for the sake of their argument."

Of course, "for the sake of their argument" meaning that the actual space for this to occur actually removes the possibility of evolution from the start. The assumption that it is isotropic is simply to give evolutionists a fighting chance.

You might enjoy reading "Chance and necessity do not explain the origin of life" from Cell Biology International (2004) journal.