For all you Monkeys out there

Crash, you use this argument pretty frequently. You should think it through a bit more.Here's an analogy, let's have the same population buying tickets for lotteries as there are today. But instead of 6 or 7 or 8 numbers to draw let's have 499 numbers. There is still a non zero chance of someone winning. But if someone did in the first few weeks I'd be very suspicious of the honesty of the lottery.We make decisions and take actions on probablities when they are 19 to 1 or 99 to 1 in "favor". When we do this (say in medical treatment tests) we are treating (tentively) .05 or .01 as being equal to zero.When the odds reach a certain low point it is probably best to treat it as zero. The origin of life questions do not hinge on odds calculated like a lottery anyway so the whole thing is silly.

Enjoy yourself.I think we can both agree that bacteria are not intelligent. If I had to place a long term bet on the survival of any higher taxon I would pick them.Lots of things have survived very well for a long time without very much intelligence. Cockroachs might serve as an example.We haven't proved that our level of intelligence (which is what Bach would be referring to) is a very good long term survival strategy. If we make our first million years, you win the bet.

I don't recall that Huxley made such a statement and I think the typewriter was invented rather late in Huxley's life so I don't think he did.And, in any case, it is a very poor analogy. It has a sort of analogy to the random generation of differences but it has NO part of it that corresponds to natural selection. The "rachet" is an important part of Darwinism.You use of this poor analogy and your getting of the source wrong hints that you don't know very much about the topic.To be able to argue with any chance of making a meaningful argument you need to understand the topic pretty well. You probably need to know it better to attack it that to defend it in fact.I'd suggest you learn something before you post anything that sounds like you think you know the answer.

Low probability can be reasonable taken as zero.If it is low enough I think it is reasonable to treat it, when trying to pick a most reasonable decision, as zero.The poster has the quote wrong. I'm pretty sure it involves an "infinite" number of monkeys. In that case the psalm would emerge in a very short time.However, the number of monkeys, if not infinite, becomes an issue. To generate a pre-selected string of enough length in a time less than the age of the universe the number of monkeys might be large beyond a resonable level.However, the analogy is bad, as I pointed out above, because it leaves out the rachet AND because it supposes a pre-selected very specific string of characters. The probability changes if any of the psalms are acceptable, or any english text of about that length or any text of about that length in any language. They change a lot. And if we were watching out millions of monks we would be just as astonished if any of these things came out.None of the living organisms that live or have lived are pre-selected in any way. There are umpty-dumpty bejillion others that would be possible outcomes and different from any that did appear.The odds calculations are silly.

Oops
I think I replyed to you when I should have been replying to Selectric III.Sorry.