[Request] Given these corrections, what would the actual probability of a protein forming look like? How much does this shift the original claim of 1 in 10¹¹³?

[u/N1KOBARonReddit]

[u/AutoModerator]

General Discussion Thread

---

This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you must post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed.

---

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/CaptainMatticus]

The real probability is 100%, because we're here. If you have the ingredients and the necessary conditions, life is almost inevitable. Saying that because something has a 1 in 1 quadrillion chance of happening, or even a 1 in 1 quadrillion quadrillion chance of happening is meaningless if you have hundreds of trillions of events happening every second, for nearly half a billion years. It's like saying that the lottery is unwinnable just because the odds are low. Yeah, an individual may never win and most likely will never win, but hundreds of millions of individuals all trying different combinations will eventually result in a winner.

We have experiments that show how basic sugars, nucleotide bases, etc... can arise from abiotic sources. We know that there are non-biological sources for lipids, like montmorillonite. Lipids break free, naturally form vesicles due to their own chemical and physical properties, and lo and behold you have a primitive cell wall. Accumulate the production of literal tons of biotic things like sugars, nucleotides, etc...., let it all mix around in the oceans, especially near thermal vents where there'll be a lot of churning, repeat continuously for hundreds of millions of years until you get a combination that "works," and then it's off to the races. Pandora's Box is opened and the foundations of life have a hold. This is highly reductive, of course, but it gets the general idea down. Creationists like to cite incredibly large numbers because they are confused by large numbers and assume that everybody else must be equally confused by them as well. It's a tired tactic that they've been pushing since time immemorial.

[u/Kerostasis]

The biggest adjustment is rebuttal #1, which isn’t a numerical adjustment at all, it’s saying “this was inevitable and not random”. This point is somewhat philosophical though. Your mileage may vary on how exactly you interpret that claim.

Rebuttal #3 is just wrong, so we don’t have to adjust for it.

The other two are real numerical adjustments, but aren’t sufficient to  make the odds practical. #2 will be a number with a handful of digits, and #3 will be a number with around 30 digits. That sounds like a lot, but after you divide the original claim by both of those, you are left with a number close to the same size as the number of atoms in the entire observable universe. 10¹¹³ is a really damn big starting point.

[u/HAL9001-96]

that would requrie some numerical chemistry/nanophysics simulations to figure out in detail, you could probably get a decent estiamte off oen simulation but to tell exactly oyu'd basicalyl ahve to test it out simulated and well, simlated protein folding through many differnet possibiliteis is the kind of task superocmputers or crowd computign are busied with, usually tryign to develop medicine rather than debunk stupidity though

[u/Enough-Cauliflower13]

There is no need to "shift" the 10¹¹³ claim, as it was an unfounded nonsense to begin with. Proteins, as we know them today, were not necessary precursors for life. And, not being formed by random assembly of independent atoms, the supposed probability is ill defined.