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.
Alas! "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of (Rome)." (with apologies to Mr. Shakespeare).
F
Strawman. Dispense with the probability-from-the-assumption-of-an-unbiased-distribution argument already. It is not applicable. Furthermore, you clearly do not have much of an idea of how just how severely strong biases in the phase space cut into the "improbability" that you are asserting for some arbitrary molecular construct. All of which is trivially verifiable with elementary analytical chemistry.
You don't think mathematics can handle these "big" numbers?
I have a PhD in Physics, and Strategerist is way off base in his claim that Sewell misunderstands the Second Law. I notice that St does not respond to calls to put up or shut up regarding that assertion.
Researchers at the Raleigh Institute near Manchester, England, announced that the monkeys in their lab produced a perfect version of "Romeo and Juliet."
"We've been holding our breath for weeks," says Alan Ripshaw, the researcher in charge of the Monkey Project. "We knew the monkeys were getting close, but we've had a number of false starts.
"One time they got to the fourth act of Macbeth, before making a mistake. The monkeys also recently typed out a Norman Mailer novel, but that doesn't count."
Ripshaw says he began the project because he was intrigued with the controversy over whether Shakespeare really was the author of the plays bearing his name.
"Some scholars think Bacon was the real author," Ripshaw says. "That's when I had the thought, 'What if they were written by monkeys?'
Ripshaw assembled 5,000 monkeys and an equal number of typewriters. The monkeys were rewarded with bananas every time they filled up a page with letters.
"Ninety-nine percent of it was nonsense," Ripshaw says. "But one of the monkeys put up a blog on the Internet, and it has a big following."
But a researcher making a final check says the monkeys made a mistake. "In one reference, they spelled 'Romeo,' 'Romero.'"
Says Ripshaw, "I guess it's back to the drawing board."
-- JAKE ANDERSON of the Weekly World News
Correct if you assume randomness and only billions.
The problem is the lipid bilayer is self assembling and not a random event. That is "Within a critical range of concentrations, certain kinds of lipids alone in a test tube of water will self-organize to form a "bilayer".
These bilayers often become spherical and over time you can have an astronomical number of them where each one is a little chemistry experiment.