Post
by ApostateltsopA » Thu Oct 01, 2015 9:30 am
I believe it is the way you are framing the events that makes our biology seem unlikely. It seems to me that rather than examine the various biological systems in the context of millions of years of evolution you are looking at what you call the odds of each individual segment of the whole of Earth's biosphere just happening to work out. However they don't just happen to work, they work based on the interactions of chemistry, and physics which we call biology.
It would be similar to me saying, what are the odds that every particle of Earth manages to stick together and orbit the sun? Well there are how many trillion trillion particles with mass? times each degree of the arc in the ellipse of the orbit? However whatever number I came up with would be misleading. We know from observation that Mass has certain properties, and one of those properties is gravity. Furthermore we know that an object with the mass of earth, in the proximity to an object with the mass of the sun can only orbit exactly as it does. So the odds are actually 100% not amazingly unlikely.
In the same sense, your body and mine are governed by complex electrical, chemical and physical interactions we call biology. Your cells and mine don't just happen to all work, they are the latest person shaped formation of a complex system we call life on earth. It would be amazingly unlikely for them to stop working in concert, not for them to continue to do so.
On an odds maker scale though, if you want to look at that. There are more galaxies full of stars in our universe, than there are grains of sand on our planet. If each star represents one attempt at an unlikely event, life, then there have been many, many, many chances for that event to happen, and even if life is unlikely at any given point in the universe, it is very likely to happen somewhere. It is absurdly unlikely that any given person will win the lottery, or get struck by lightening. However people win and get hit regularly.
Finally, we don't know that life is unlikely. We do know that organic compounds form from inorganic compounds as a necessary result of chemistry in certain circumstances. We know that there is a very blurry line between life and not life when we look closely. Case in point, the debate over whether or not viruses constitute life. I take any argument for the statistical probability of an event with a grain of salt, until I see how the person making the claim is deriving their numbers.
Does that make more sense?