The OPs acquaintance may have been right not to be convinced by the “1 in an incomprehensibly big number” argument. The domain in question (genes, insentient nature) operates by cause and effect, so there is no such thing as the million other paths evolution could have followed to make men and chimps different.
However the simple evidence of the similarity in the genomes should have been very convincing.
([…] insentient nature) operates by cause and effect, so there is no such thing as the million other paths evolution could have followed to make men and chimps different.
You can’t assume the universe is deterministic some of the time and not other parts of the time. According to chaos theory, a tiny change could’ve caused those million other paths. (But the probability of that, conditional on no Descartes’ Demon or similar, is zero, since no events that _didn’t_ occur have occurred.)
Many, many different possible sets of gene sequences would explain the world in which we live, therefore we should count them.
The OPs acquaintance may have been right not to be convinced by the “1 in an incomprehensibly big number” argument. The domain in question (genes, insentient nature) operates by cause and effect, so there is no such thing as the million other paths evolution could have followed to make men and chimps different.
However the simple evidence of the similarity in the genomes should have been very convincing.
You can’t assume the universe is deterministic some of the time and not other parts of the time. According to chaos theory, a tiny change could’ve caused those million other paths. (But the probability of that, conditional on no Descartes’ Demon or similar, is zero, since no events that _didn’t_ occur have occurred.)
Many, many different possible sets of gene sequences would explain the world in which we live, therefore we should count them.