Response to "Tornado in a junkyard" meme.
I'm sure we've all heard it, life arising on earth would be "statistically similar" to a tornado going through a junk yard and assembling a car.
This usually left me mouth gapped at the stupid involved and it was difficult to develop a reply that might be understood by someone impressed by this. So I came up with the following, if you have a better response, I'd love to hear/read it.
"Imagine an object that spews particles in random directions. Then imagine one particle must travel 90,000,000 miles (8 minutes at the speed of light), hit something, bounce off then land in a target less than 5mm in diameter. What are the odds of THAT?"
Well, it's called "seeing" and we do it billions of times every danged second of every day.
Thoughts, refinements, alternatives all welcomed!!!
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button."Your ignorance of statistics is solely your problem, sunshine."
"And your logical fallacies are: 1 false analogy, 2 personal incredulity, 3 straw man and 4 false cause. And your biases are: 1. belief bias, 2 backfire effect, 3 Dunning-Kruger effect and 4 in-group bias. References: [yourlogicalfallacyis.com] and [yourbias.is] . Have a great day! 
"
anglophone
Level 9
Apr 8, 2022
0
Well, as the old saying goes, "If you are going to wrestle with a pig, expect to get dirty."
@Normanbites Yep! And I have a particular penchant for bacon.
The tornado argument and your response both argue from the point of statistical probability, however, life is a result of evolutionary development which is a process that operates according to specific rules, meaning that the arising of life is much more likely than random probability. The person making the tornado argument is not one who will be impressed by either argument though, because they're just f'cking stupid.
Cyklone
Level 7
Apr 8, 2022
2
Ask the web this question, “How many photons have to sfrike a cone or a rod in the human retina before it sends a signal that the brain interprets as light?”
I ssked that, and then asked about the cat retina. I was surprised. I haven’t asked about any other animal retina.
yvilletom
Level 8
Apr 8, 2022
1
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