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The laws of physics and the biochemical laws that emerge from them. Randomness is just one part of the evolutionary process. You also need some kind of self-replication and selection process. Evolution has never been understood as a 'completely' random process. Another factor the above quotes seem to ignore is that evolution is a cumulative process. Those probabilities refer to typing out a book from scratch. The chances would be considerably shorter if you can keep intermediary stages - so once you have the first word 'correct' you keep it (as does evolution - each new species doesn't have to go through the entire evolutionary process starting from abiogenesis, just the preceding species). The analogy between writing books and evolution breaks down here as one might ask how do we know what the 'correct' first word, or species, is. In the former case 'correct' is defined by some external criterion, but for evolution correct simply means it survives to reproduce.

A point I haven't seen made yet is that DNA encodes four nucleotides. Codons are groups of three nucleotides - so there are 64 possible "words". All words translate to either an amino acid, or stop, with multiple codons encoding each amino acid. This means that: 1) All possible sequences can be expressed into proteins. There are no gibberish sequences, unlike the English language. 2) Multiple sequences encode the same string of amino acids. There is a considerable level of redundancy. Several monkeys could type different DNA strings which encode the same protein. 3) All proteins are subject to environmental selection. The process of eliminating or retaining DNA strings is non-random, as opposed to monkeys banging typewriters. So the analogy fails on multiple levels.

Earlier in the battle of Dogger Bank, due to the hit of an English shell, the powder charges ignited in one of the towers of the main caliber of the cruiser Seidlitz, the explosion did not occur. The Germans took this into account and modernized the projectile supply system from the point of view of fire safety. On the British battlecruisers, this was not done and as a result, in the Battle of Jutland, there was an explosion of cellars on Indefatible, Queen Mary and Invisible The Battle of Jutland can be considered a victory for the German fleet, as it suffered fewer losses than the British fleet. But the British fleet was ready to go to sea the next day to perform combat missions and the German fleet had most of the ships forced to stand up for repairs for six months. The tactic is to allow more of their ships to fire on a portion of the enemy's ships while most of the enemy's ships would not be able to fire effectively. Here, a characteristic maneuver is the coverage of the head of the column of the enemy fleet by high-speed cruisers. This is a favorite maneuver of the Japanese navy, they tried to use it during the battle in the Yellow Sea and during the Battle of Tsushima.

Yet by 1924 the Weimar Republic made a staggering recovery effectively ending hyperinflation in record time. By 1928 the stabilization of the Republic was also reflected politically with the extremist parties only getting a small fraction of the votes (communists around 10, Nazis less than 3). By 1929 the standing of the Republic improved to a degree that the Young plan initiated relief and the end of the occupation of the Rhineland. I.e. there is not a direct line from the post-war woes to the rise of the NSDAP and WWII, unless one cuts out close of a decade of development. Aside from the looming stock market crash, much of the destabilization of the Weimar Republic actually came from the inside, with the nationalist DNVP opposing the economically successful government and seizing on an anti-Young plan movement to bolster nationalist and populist tendencies. Hugenberg, the head of the DNVP was an industrialist and had one of the most widely read newspaper at the time and used it to fan the flames and also bolstered Hitler's (and the NSDAP's) reputation among the working class, to gain broader support.

This sounds a bit like the Dunning-Kruger effect. I am not entirely sure what OP in this split is really about, however it occurred to me that using a framework like Bloom's taxonomy could help guide the discussion a bit, assuming it is not all hippopotamuses all the way down. In the this system, knowledge is the lowest cognitive effort and is based on memorization of information. The next step up is comprehension, which includes the ability to restate information and so on. In this framework, it could mean that folks with the lowest level of understanding are also more likely to dismiss contradicting information as they have not reached the higher levels of learning, which would allow them to contextualize and evaluate new information. If you allow a small rant from my side, I think the rise of youtube level education is a great example of low-level learning. Many that I have seen are created with entertainment in mind and giving viewer the impression of having learned something, but often they are vacuous strings of facts and factoids without any of the hallmark of higher understanding (and I think it is at least part of the reason why the recent generations of students feel that they know more than they really do).

Not in Germany, there wasn't. The Weimar Republic had its first economic collapse in 1923, due to inability to pay reparations in 1922, subsequent French occupation of the Ruhr valley. See here ... The hyperinflation crisis, 1923 - The Weimar Republic 1918-1929 - Edexcel - GCSE History Revision - Edexcel - BBC Bitesize A Hitler made his first attempt n during this time, the 'Biergarten Putsch' for which he was incarcerated ( giving him time to write Mein Kampf ). By this time Mussolini had already marched on Rome, in 1922. The 'wheels' of WW2 were already in motion in the early 20s.

Ok, I figured it out.

There is no difference, fundamentally, so you are right not to see it, I think. Schrödinger had some funny ideas in later life, as quite often happens to famous scientists. Many processes in nature involve decreases in local entropy, that is, in part of the thermodynamic system. But they are always accompanied by a greater increase in entropy in some other part of the system. For example, when water freezes, the entropy of the ice crystals is lower than liquid water, but Latent Heat is exported to the environment, increasing its entropy. Similarly, the metabolic processes of life generate waste heat. So entropy increases all the time a living organism grows. There is nothing special going on, thermodynamically speaking.

Why would you think the opposite of random be intention? I don't know what you mean that total randomness is a clock-work universe. What even is total-randomness? The distinction i made between them was that one emerges from the other. I'm no physicist but entropy doesn't predict disorder, but measures it. And chaos is an entirely different phenomenon again (i.e. non-linear dynamics). I think by throwing around these terms you are only confusing yourself. We have regions of high entropy and regions of low entropy. Why would you think you need two laws of physics for this to be? By analogy you might say because there are diabetics and non-diabetics there must be two completely different laws of biology. No, diabetes and its absence occurs as a continuum in a single system.

Something to brighten your day/night.... And without doubt the biggest toppest sellingest singing group from the fifities.......

But you have an infinite number of them, so it actually takes almost no time at all. The issue here is someone is trying to baffle/intimidate their audience with large numbers, while also ignoring the incredibly large numbers involved in chemistry. Avogadro's number, for example, is 6.02 x 10^23. That's just one gram of hydrogen atoms. 100 grams of something of atomic number 100. The mass of the earth, meanwhile, is 6 x 10^24 kg 283 trillion trillion is 2.83 x 10^20. In the scheme of things it's a small number. *Nobody with decent understanding.

As @exchemist says, evolution is not random. That's a misrepresentation commonly used by creationists to caricature the mechanism of evolution. If you think deeply about it, everything is random. The key for some kind of adaptation is that: 1) The replicating mechanism is fast 2) The background conditions, though being ultimately random, reshuffle so slowly as compared to the replication process as to provide a sufficiently slow background (and thereby effectively non-random) for the replication mechanism to adapt to them. Almost x-posted with @StringJunky and @studiot and I have to read more carefully the whole thread. X-posted with @Ghideon.

Yes the authors are quite correct in what they say about the scenario they describe. But it would be statistically quite wrong to apply this statement to evolution. The monkeys are performing the same (statistical) experiment over and over again. That is they are repeating one single experiment. Evolution is about the confluence of many many simultaneous experiments. The statistics of such a process is entirely different. Applied to the monkeys this is equivalent to applying a whole bunch of 'filters' or constraints, themselves perhaps random in some way but maybe also biased. So that for example certain keys are occasionally electrified so the monkey will shy away from them. And another filter is applied so that the resultant electrification shepherds the monkeys into typing the keys for the letters in their order of frequency in the English language. Now apply a very large number of such filters all compounded together. I wish you well in finding out the resultant text the monkeys migh come up with as the possibilities are truly staggering. So much so that you could be studying for the age of the Universe and never see a repeated text.

Nobody has ever argued that the complexity of life is due to randomness alone. That's a particularly silly - and annoying -creationist representation of evolution (tornado in a junkyard etc). The complexity of life is due to natural selection operating on variations in a population. There's nothing random about selection. So we can dismiss the monkey argument as far as life is concerned. When it comes to non-living "complexity", it is unclear to me what you mean. The anthropic principle is not about complexity, so I don't really follow where your hypothetical monkeys come into it.

Also, it is quite disingenuous to equate the probably strongest hyperbole of one member of a party to a the long-standing attack on science and scientists of a major party. This includes denial of evolution and the insistence to elevate creationism to an alternative explanation, dismantling, marginalizing and dismantling institutions responsible for evidence-based protection of public health which directly resulted in a massive number of preventable deaths in the US (in fact, there was only one party which decided to play "identity politics" with simple health measures...). The GOP decided at some point go over the cliff completely, McCain, in a bid for presidency had highlighted the importance of reacting to client change and now the party has decided that instead, that is a hoax. And consistent with this belief, obvious scientists are frauds. Heck, the whole right-wing ecosystem has untied in claiming that climate science is a fraud, and directly attack scientists like Mann. If you have a whole community ranging from voters, media to lawmakers being united in the belief that science is a scam and not to be trusted, I think it is fair to say that one is not like the other. And if the only means of equating these things is by pointing out an individual vs the history of a whole ideology, it does not seem that a good faith discussion is to be had. I may have mentioned it before, but politicians in general are typically not allies of scientists. However, while currently the left tends to ignore inconvenient findings (or in this case, overstating findings), it is the right that has gone on the attack on facts. And it is not a new thing. It is not specific to the US (anymore), the recent rise of right-wing populism through much of Europe has intensified attacks on the perceived "elites" and have put ideology before science.

It’s a misstatement. Strictly speaking, vapor is gas. But what’s being described has condensed somewhat into small droplets of liquid, much like water vapor condenses and forms a cloud. You can’t see it in its gaseous form. At the right temperature and pressure, both will exist.

Correct. In a cloaked Klingon ship, no less. AFAIK, it was not a nuclear wessel

Isn't this the Jeremy England hypothesis?

So you will understand when I try to teach you adjustment is necessary to your brief, and usually vague, posts ?