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| Image by Guillaume Riesen via sxc.hu |
Another area in which science illiteracy rears its head is probably and statistics. You’ll often hear them say, “Well evolution can’t be true because the probability of a 300 amino acid long protein chain forming randomly is (1/20)^300.” Another favorite is “Well either God exist or he doesn’t so the odds are fifty-fifty. “
Probabilities are averages of thousands of events taking place over time. When it comes to abiogenesis we are talking about thousands of people rolling thousands of pairs of dice. All that is needs is for one combination of rolls such that life arises from non life.
The other issue here is probabilities sum to one. As long as the probability (P) of an event (A) is greater than zero not only will it happen, but given a long enough interval it will happen multiple times.
Because two options exist does not mean they have the same probability. Evidence of an event occurring determines its probability. For example a person either has oatmeal for breakfast or doesn’t. However if the person always has oatmeal then the probability of not having oatmeal is zero.
The take home here is the state with the most evidence is the more probable one. And
when given two or more competing hypotheses with the same evidence, the one with the least assumptions is usually the correct one.
The main problem is people don’t know what statistics is. In most cases they are referring to opinion polls and questionnaires, not the analysis of data culled from experiments. Thus theses “statistics” can be used to justify anything, because sampling size and the questions asked can be manipulated to stack the deck in favor of the pollster’s conclusion.
For instance what if I asked 500 random people if they liked Macs versus PC? But only recorded those that said they liked PC, and then used that to claim the majority of people like PCs. This is why the peer review process is key to prevent pseudoscience from running amok.