Sure. Lots of chances are improved that way. By design. Oh, wait …
From New Scientist (“Chances of first life improved by weighted dice”), the latest buzz is Christoph Adami’s recent claims. He got rid of live organisms and just used information theory:
Adami calculates that if you start with an equal number of each type of monomer, the odds of getting a self-replicating molecule are very low. But if you adjust the distribution of monomers in the environment to match the distribution within a potential self-replicator, the chances improve by many orders of magnitude (arxiv.org/abs/1409.0590). It’s a bit like hammering randomly on a keyboard on which the most frequently used letters are proportionally larger – your odds of accidentally typing a word are much better than the famous infinite monkeys banging on typewriters.
Once a self-replicator emerges at random, evolution can start improving its abilities. “You only have to make this very first step, where you are getting some crappy replicator,” says Adami. “The moment evolution can actually work with it, you’re done.”
So “evolution” is now a workman who needs materials to be finished to a certain point? Or magic? Instead of the “”crappy replicator just stopping, it builds cells like supercomputers?
He relies on the fact that meteorites show different compositions: “It is not impossible that basic self-replicators cooked up on some meteor and ended up contaminating Earth.”
“Not impossible” is not an outlier, it is the standard for science in origin of life research today.
See, for example, Can all the numbers for life’s origin just happen to fall into place?
and
Maybe if we throw enough models at the origin of life… some of them will stick?
For ID theorist Bill Dembski’s comment on the claim, go here.
More “Adami’s”: Evolution Professor: Origin of Life “Not Impossible”
Evolution, we are now told, punishes the selfish and mean …
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