Re:Even complex things can happen at random. (Score 1)

The reason that Nature can "roll" the script of MacBeth (and in fact it did) is because it is much more likely to "roll" a program (Shakespeare's DNA) that does something complicated then it is to "roll" the complicated thing directly. The program, the living and breathing Shakespeare, then interacts with its environment and writes plays. (or late-night posts) There was no guarantee Shakespeare's DNA would result in a man that wrote Macbeth-- as we may find the day we start cloning humans for fun and profit[tm]-- the important thing is that evolution made that man possible.

What is the chance, for example, of randomly producing the digits of Pi? Zero since the sequence is of infinite length. On the other hand the chance of randomly generating a computer program that generates PI is better. (The probability is still: 1/2^[length of the program in bits].) The odds are best if the particular programming language we use has the right primitives. In that case just the characters "Pi" could be enough and assuming a 8bit encoding per character the chance of rolling this program is only 1/65536! Easy.

Evolution is a kind of computer program; at each stage the DNA whose host has lots of children (ie. is succesful at being copied) will give those children even better primitives to work with. At each stage only a small "leap" is required and that's why evolution works.

A. Wait