(May 10, 2019 at 2:43 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote:(May 9, 2019 at 11:36 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote: Except he didn’t address it. What he did was to use an bullshit analogy with additional flourish - a very tight drop dead deadline - absent from the hypothesis it attempts to mimic to insinuate that the support cited for the original hypothesis suffers from extreme sample bias, when in fact the 60 second drop dead deadline has no analogy in the theory of abiogenesis. The notion that the average lock picking process takes days or many time longer than the prisoner has does not exactly correspond to any well supported theory of what is going on during abiogenesis.
In fact the observation that life arose on earth in less than 10% of the time it had available to arise - far skewed to the quick side of 50% one would expect to be average of the random sample constrained by the sample Windows - suggest the sample bias or the size of the sample window is weak explanation for the observation of quick abiogenesis.
So he tries to pass off as an analogy that which is no analogy, in order discredit a red herring. And he did it in a manner very much reminiscent of a confidence trickster.
Let’s examine his bullshit analogy further by extending it. Let’s say the prisoner picked the lock in not 60 seconds but 6 seconds. Someone then tells him via YouTube that he would have dropped dead in 60 seconds, ie before now, had he not picked the lock, so his sample is skewed, but he sees zero evidence for that to be the case. Should he conclude based on the available evidence of his picking of the lock in 6 seconds is likely a freakish occurrence, skewed by observer biases, and not an indication of how easily can the lock be picked?
@polymath257 expressed similar concerns about the "prisoner" thought experiment. To me (at least at first blush) the thought experiment seems to adequately show the possibility that fast abiogenesis on earth could be a fluke. What am I missing?
Both of you suggest that the window of time is somehow artificial. As I see it, it is not. Let's say that with our star there is a "window" of, say 8 billion years after the earth cooled for life to arise. After all, isn't our sun going to heat up enough to evaporate the oceans? And let's also posit that (for all we know) the chance of amino acids arranging in a fashion that they begin self replication is only likely to occur once every 20 billion years (r something).
To me, all the thought experiment is trying to say is: maybe we got lucky. Until we get more data, this is a possibility worth considering.
Ahh, but in this case, the expected time for development of life would be around the 4 billion year mark. The *actual* time on Earth was around the 700 million year mark with the Earth only being cool enough at the 500 million year mark. So, of about 8 billion years, we see life very early on.
To keep the analogy with the video, there would have to be a 'cut off' time period of around 500 million years. And *that* is what I see no evidence to support.
To continue the analogy in the video: if there is a cut off after 6 minutes, we would expect everyone that succeeds in getting out to do so within the first 6 minutes. But if, instead, the cut off was 6 hours (and picking the lock takes, on average, 600 hours), we would expect a distribution within that 6 hour time period. It would be very surprising to have someone that survived picking the lock within 6 minutes.
In the case of the Earth, there seems to be no reason to expect a barrier to the formation of life through the first several billion years. But we actually see life form almost immediately after it becomes possible. So the analogy fails.
