Poem: "Copy-Paste Errors"

That about sums it up.

>> Yeah. I saw some "intelligent Design" people pointing out how it takes a long time to do certain tasks, like, randomly sort the 26 letters until they all appear in alphabetical order, claiming this shows how it's impossible for random chance to bring about life. <<

That's because humans get bored and stop doing the thing. Nature doesn't get bored. Things are always doing.

>> The first, biggest fallacy is the assumption that it is entirely random. It's more like, when EF get together, they never split and start looking for a place to be and if they find CED they're stuck to the end and so on. <<

The trials are random at first. What they're leaving out is the effect of the errors: less effective things give way to more effective things. Why is a soap bubble round? It's the most efficient shape. You can make a cubical one, but that takes work. Some amino acids are more useful than others, more inclined to stick together in interesting shapes.

>> The second is a failure to understand how incredibly fucking *huge* the world is - and it's the biggest, messiest, brute force computer program in existence. We're solving problems now that our ancestors wouldn't even have contemplated solving, even *with* computers. And the world is far, far, bigger with far, far more processing power. <<

And how old. Several billion years times trillions of planets etc. is a lot of dice-rolling.

>> Alas, it doesn't seem to reveal any clear answers (except possibly "what is the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything?"). <<

It reveals all kinds of answers. Most people just don't have enough existential intelligence to ask the questions or match them up with the answers.

Take the question of "what happens after death?" Set aside those of us with farmemory, because most people don't have that, and we want an answer whose evidence is readily accessible to everyone. Well, almost everything in existence is a cycle. Rain falls, water runs downhill, collects in low places, evaporates up into the sky, and rains back down again. Nothing is created or destroyed. Therefore, simple statistical probability indicates that in a universe where almost everything is a cycle, any process which is partly obscured is probably also a cycle. The chance of it being a cycle is numerically much higher than it being a one-way process, based on the total mass of observable examples all around us.

>> (My other favorite fallacy is the one about how entropy always increases in a closed system. "Yeah! You're right,it does! Why, to overcome entropy, we'd have to have... I dunno, a fusion reactor nearly a hundred million miles out to provide enough energy to overcome it!") <<

Even the scientists seem not to have noticed the counterpoint. Entropy is a disorganizing force; syntropy is an organizing force. Life builds up and death winds down, in a perfectly balanced cycle. The death of stars is what makes possible the life of planets, organized matter coalescing out of chaos. I think quantum physicists are closest to figuring out this side of things, because they're at the far end of science staring across the gap at magic. But every time they're about to let go and explore the really cool stuff in the middle, they panic and put their claws out and cling harder.

Eh, they'll get there eventually.