Percy writes:
The key point is that a read of that paper indicates that Koonin thinks "spontaneous formation" of something extremely complex is a necessary prerequisite for life, and he does what creationists do here all the time, make up an incredibly tiny probability out of thin air. My bullshit alarm bells are going off like crazy, and I'm wondering why yours aren't, too.
To say fair, Koonin does point out that there could well be far more probable ways in which life could arise. Indeed, as I read it, he's just saying that we haven't yet worked them out.
He does overstate his case, arguably, but that's because he's trying to make the point that, even if you took one of the apparently extremely improbable examples of how life could have arisen naturally in a finite universe, in the currently popular "many world's" scenario, even that way of life originating is
inevitably going to happen.
His argument implies that, if the many world's hypothesis is correct, the intelligent design folk can forget their intelligent designer as being necessary for
any observed phenomena in our known sector of the universe, so long as it doesn't break any physical laws, no matter how unlikely it may seem.
Interestingly, this would mean that if life arose here by some unknown but much more probable process (in the many worlds scenario, that would just mean more common), it would still have arisen elsewhere by the process he describes, as well as arising elsewhere by the same means as here, and by any other possible means.
So, he's not saying that his apparently highly improbable way of life arising is the only way, but that if it were, life is still inevitable under the many worlds hypothesis.
The most interesting thing to me about the paper is not about OOL, particularly, but about how we would approach probabilities in a "many worlds" cosmology.
I don't think your bullshit alarm is necessary, as the paper is very, very pro naturalistic OOL in its implications, and Koonin's certainly not claiming that there aren't more probable ways than his for life to arise. If ICDesign was capable of understanding it, he wouldn't have brought it up, but he did so because Koonin is being quotemined by creationists elsewhere (something one of the papers reviewers predicted, to my amusement!).
As for the calculations in the appendix, he describes these as "naive" earlier in the paper.
{I know this post is off topic, but I thought the paper was interesting, even if slightly flakey. If ICDesign expresses incredulity about any detail in the evolution of the skeleton, and you're getting pissed off, you can always say to him that, according to his friend Koonin, if it's physically possible, it's inevitable that it would have happened in one of the many worlds.
}