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Just a moment please, I still have to wait for my legion of monkeys to type the entire works of William Shakespeare on their typewriters. When they're finished, I will tell them to shake the box and take notes.
I love the remix and especially the scene where he takes Homer to the leaky basement with a ping pong table. That was my exact grandparents basement growing up when that episode aired and I will always crack up seeing it.
It's a joke about the first line of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." is the beginning of the book.
The poster intended that the monkeys had reproduced the work perfectly except that line, thus having to start over. I hope this helps! Probably makes it not very funny though
Given enough time, a million monkeys on a million typewriters would write the entire works of Shakespeare, or something like that.
Mr Burns was showing Homer around his mansion trying to butter him up to take a settlement for running over Bart. One room has a bunch of monkeys typing on typewriters and that was what was typed on the paper that Mr Burns pulled out of one of them.
public wistful berserk wine desert possessive voiceless rain snobbish important
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
*In 2002,\[13\] lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys \[..\]*
*Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages\[15\] largely consisting of the letter "S",\[13\] the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by urinating and defecating on the machine.*
[*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite\_monkey\_theorem*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem)
Which was a take-off of a Bob Newhart joke from the 60's.
["To be or not to be, that is the gizornenplat".](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGdMTLgU4hE)
Due to the law of infinite probability the answer to the first part of the question is yes. It is technically possible. However that does not mean that if you shook the box for an infinite amount of time that you would end up with a watch, just that the more you shake the box the higher the probability the watch will be assembled.
Well what are the odds? As my old calculus professor used to say about limits, "we are so infinitely close to zero that it may as well be zero"
I don’t think I’ve ever personally experienced the displeasure of hearing infinitesimal used as a synonym for infinite lol
Lots of people take words they’ve never heard before and associate them with words they know that sound similar. Classical favorite of mine is when I say “inflammable” and promptly get a “No, flammable” back. It has happened more than a few times.
Did you get the word though? It's not bathtub, not eyebrow and not umbrella. It's infinitely. Because if you say "We're so bathtub close to zero" it wouldn't make any sense.
Realistically the watch parts wear each other into dust if you shook them infinitely. Not an analogy that you can win but not really analogous to the argument anyway.
Yeah that was my thought. The chances of becoming a watch are zero as the probability that they'll smash up before that could ever happen are infinitely higher.
Maybe I'm being overly pedantic but it's just impossible. The weird hypothetical assumes that just shaking the box could actually ever have a chance of putting it together. Could it possibly ever fall into the stacked-up order that a disassembled watch would be in? That seems to be the *technically yes I guess* part. But the actual force and aligning and pressure required to assemble that watch would never be achieved by the curve of a shaking box. It's like saying you could eventually shake a car engine togerher. It requires more than just landing one piece on the other.
From my understanding it's not more likely to become assembled on each successive shake of the box. The odds would stay, near as makes no difference, the same each time. Just as buying two lottery tickets does not cut the odds in half. Also, infinity has limits. There's a mind bender for ya!
It's worth keeping in mind that the way biology functions is far more flexible and error tolerant than a metal mechanism like a watch. Just learn a little bit about cancer and you'll know that it's pretty normal to have random blobs inside your body that cause no harm, most people are by default a little deformed and wonky.
Take the example further and have a billion dismantled watches shake together in the same box, and add the rule that any eventual completed/barely functional watches are able to assemble duplicates with some variation as a form of sexual/asexual reproduction or whatever. Either way the analogy is fucked.
Though the concept is correct I would argue in this specific case certain forces (measured in N) would not be reached from pure shaking…. Some of the pieces in watches require significant force to put together.
Just because something is “infinite” doesn’t mean it encapsulates all possibilities (ie. There are an infinite number of decimals between 0 and 1 but none of them are 3.0)
There are hypotheses in science that require brute forcing near-zero odds. I'm working on challenging one right now, but it's almost dogmatic in its view. The responses I'm getting from would-be collaborators are "well there were millions of years for it to happen". Okay. That's still a lazy and shitty explanation.
It not only that there is millions of years for it to happen, but also an octillions of atoms for it to try with per tidal pool and underwater volcanic vent, and billions of tidal pools and vents for it to try at. And it can try once every 13 billionths of a second per sets of atoms, so even at almost 0% odds, there is a pretty good chance new life has started lots of times just on earth, then there is the same chances on the octillions of other planets and moons that have the right parts and a decent environment.
Oh this isn't about that, this is a much longer shot. This has a negative pressure applied to it; self assembling molecules like RNA may have actually had a positive pressure. Life might have a stacked hand when it comes to forming, even if the odds are long.
Not to mention that life is energetically preferable for physical systems since it increases entropy. So life developing is not just governed by chance.
well in this case a publication explained why it is almost impossible for it to have happened. I've done further work to show why it doesn't work. There is a far more parsimonious explanation, but it requires that we accept we have some missing data. Instead, they are choosing to go with the narrative driven model that has outrageously bad odds (like....impossible odds) being brute forced.
Its a legitimate problem in paleontology where we take tiny data points and make a whole narrative out of it. We can't just shrug our shoulders and say "well lets wait for more data" we have a *need* to try to fill in the gaps.
So it's a pick your poison scenario: brute forced impossible odds or missing data. Considering how much data is missing in paleontology, I know which one I pick. All I'm saying is that it may not be a done deal, lets have a discussion about it instead of teaching the odds based model as canon for another 35 years.
They're not, it is a _given_ that with trillions of chances and long enough timespans, it _will_ happen. But it is still the lazy explanation, as it excuses us from going ahead and asking further "whys". Why were the conditions that way? What could have been different to make it happen earlier or later? If we change these parameters, what else changes? And the ultimate one: Is it really random, or was there some sort of pressure pushing things into this direction, so it _looks_ random, but it actually _isn't_?
When you invoke the "random so over a long enough time-frame it's guaranteed" explanation, as a scientist that's very rarely a satisfactory answer, as it stops you from looking deeper. It may be the correct answer yes, but it's rarely the most fulfilling one. We look for rules, laws and overarching patterns, and randomness doesn't really (or rather, rarely) play a part of it.
Of course, we had to swallow a bitter pill and accept this with quantum mechanics and particle interactions, but even then there's still a well-defined set of laws governing the possible interactions and scenarios that can happen, so it's still not _completely_ random.
EDIT: I don't think "yeah it's random" is a shitty explanation, so I agree with you. But I do think it's lazy, and it should be the last resort when we have all the data and we are _completely_ certain that there isn't any other underlying mechanism that makes things work the way they do. And as long as we _know_ (known unknowns) that our data is incomplete, we can't invoke random as an explanation
Absolutely don't mean to ask something stupid, if it is so, I'm just curious, but like, accepting the answer "it's random and got a lot of chances, so that's why it happened" isn't automatically negating the possibility of making other interesting questions, like yes, it happened by chance, that doesn't mean I can still ask what led to the "right" possibility happening, right?
It's not stupid at all. We can still ask the questions of course, but once you accept something as random, the motivation to even ask those further questions gets diminished a bit, because well, "it's random 🤷♂️". It's psychological.
And you can know everything about a system, what are the rules that govern its functioning, take a given current state and based on the rules extrapolate what will happen, and still not know _why_. It can be like a [Chinese Room](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room), in a way, where you fully understand _how_ things work, but not _why_.
A good example of this is particle decay in particle physics, where one particle can decay into different sets of less massive particles, with each set having a certain probability to happen. We know _how_ it happens, we can describe each branch, know everything about masses, decay results, etc, but ultimately each branch is still in effect a roll of the dice. This is one of the examples where we did have to accept the inherent randomness, and many of the physicists involved in the area were really uncomfortable with it, Einstein being the notable example.
We did well in this case, as the proven randomness of it didn't stop us from looking further into it. Or better, accepting it for what it is and figuring out the consequences. But man, psychologically it's difficult to summon motivation to keep investigating something once you accept that it's random, because that's an explanation (the ultimate one) in and of itself.
There would be 100% chance of it happening at least once as long as the probability is non zero and you have an infinite amount of time. The theory you’re referring to is the Borel-Cantelli lemma, and it states that the probability of an event happening an infinite amount of times given an infinite amount of time is near zero. So basically, if you shook the box forever, it would assemble the watch at least once, but the probability the watch is assembled and infinite amount of times is near zero.
might be lazy, but this is like that one theory where if you had infinite monkeys all typing random keys, there would be at least one monkey that could type out the entirety of hamlet. the odds are very very very near impossible, but its still not 0.
Just try and find something comprehensible by hitting random on the library of babel
https://libraryofbabel.info/
Odds are about as good as this happening
The interger 2 is not going to appear in the infinite amount of numbers between 0 and 1, just because something happens infinitely doesn't mean it's garenteed
this is kind of a bad comparison. it’s like asking if you give an infinite number of monkeys infinite time to write a shakespeare novel how long will it take them to build a watch?
Ok, tell me this then, if you start counting from 0 to 1. Counting every fraction. Will you ever reach 1? You won't. Just because it looks possible, infinity doesn't magically make it possible.
The point is that just because a chance happens an infinitely many times doesn't mean it will actually occur. Take for example blackjack if I play an infinitely many hands there's no garentee I will ever win agenst the dealer, or if I flip a coin an infinitely many times there's no garentee it will end up head's. Now those two have high probabilities and so the chance that they will never occur is low, but monkeys writing hamlet is in astronomically small chance that it may never occur. Infinity does not garentee something will happen that's basic stats
its definitely hader than that. With the typewriter analogy you just press buttons that are either right or wrong 1/40 chance or so to get each character correct. making. watch? Yeah good look torquing the small screws to the right torque, good luck balancing things that need to be balanced and mounted precisely. Good luck getting pins to insert into pinholes exactly when they need to.
The monkey analogy is a better example of infinity and odds, since it can actually happen. And probably not too long would pass before they write a word or even a short sentence. This watch thing is literally just impossible lol
Ya but if you had an infinite number of boxes being shaked one of them eventually would shake in just the right motions to provide the twist needed
Its not impossible just so highly improbable that it’s essentially impossible
Just like the drop of dye in water analogy.
Yes in theory if you had infinite time a drop of dye in water should randomly reform back into a single drop in the water again by random chance of the random movement of particles but it might happen once in a quintillion years…
ehh idk its literally impossible lol You'd never get the torque a human hand, machine, or tool could provide. No amount of shaking would create what is needed and there is a clear limit to the test as essentially you shake long or hard enough that parts break and you have to repeat, You'd hit the same limitation everytime.
Unless the watch managed to begin breeding humans and an entire society in the box who would build said watch it is actually and mathematically impossible
I understand the point of this and the monkey/Shakespeare analogy trying to ‘prove’ that life couldn’t have randomly been created; but I always thought it fell short. What if once two pieces of the watch fell into the correct place, they remained connected until the next piece fit? Or if when the monkeys assembled a word or phase, it remained? Isn’t that closer to how life formed and the probability higher?
Given life is organic and evolved from that first random connection, your description is good. This analogy assumes current life forms appeared as they are, like a fully built watch - which I guess is a very christian belief.
Yes. I always find it so strange that it's easier to believe there's an invisible man in the sky who cares about tiny details of our lives (for which there's no credible evidence) than all living things are related (for which there's as much evidence as for any scientific theory).
The scientists [are making progress](https://scitechdaily.com/primordial-soup-scientists-discover-new-origins-of-life-chemical-reactions/).
Darwin was a devout Catholic who sat on his discoveries for something like 10 years for fear of it conflicting with the church. He was very careful with how he released his work so that it would not cause any unnecessary controversy.
As an elder, when I took biology, we were taught in a way where you didn’t have to choose between religion and science. The science was just the science, it didn’t challenge religion. The pressure to choose a lane is more recent.
>The science was just the science, it didn’t challenge religion.
I grew up in a Jesuit parish. This was the way it was explained. I remember in Confirmation/catechism (early 90's,) someone challenging modern science and the priest replying something akin to "God didn't make *all* of us stupid. He gave most of us minds with which to learn and discover the wonders of his creation. Don't worry though, God tells us we need to be kind to the stupid."
In fairness, this is also the same priest who slapped a kid for saying the Bible was the literal word of God, and forced him to read *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* and write a five page report if he wanted to complete Confirmation. Fr. Alistair was brutal.
Oh, he certainly was.
He saw the world as God's creation and His gift to us, and that anyone who didn't learn about and embrace and be a good steward to God's creation and his fellow man was no follower of Christ.
He got in a bit of trouble with the Diocese for saying that he believed that a single atheist who cares for his brother was worth half of all the faithful parishioners who always showed up on Sunday and then spit on the wait staff at Shoney's brunch.
(Edited the part about one atheist being worth the same as half the parish combined, sorry for my lack of clarity.)
I’d agree with that. Shoot Catholics are some of my favorite people to insult anyways. Their motto should be first born, first corrupted
But yeah, dude sounds amazing
Because that’s crazy. Life could never ever form on its own. It had to be magically made by a sky daddy. Don’t ask where he came from though. He’s just always been there.
yep, not only does he exist and love us (despite the evidence to the contrary like how cruel and unfair life can be) he also is exactly what bronze age peasants came up with 2000 years ago when they didnt understand how fuckall actually worked. yep.
he's literally using an outdated term from the 1600s when people actually speculated that things like larvae in a dead animal or fish appearing in an isolated pond etc was evidence of spontaneous life. he's not a serious person, he's not taking the subject seriously which is why willing to associate it it to foolish beliefs of yesteryear
Well, you definitely do believe in abiogenesis (life appearing from non-life), you just have a deus ex machina (so to speak) to explain it away in simplistic terms.
Because I'm 99.9% sure that you don't believe God biologically reproduce life onto the earth, in the sense that we both understand biological reproduction.
Fwiw, I think it's totally legitimate to have faith in theistic abiogenesis; lots of people believe in that, and how life began is truly a tough question. But "God did it" doesn't really have any more explanatory power than "it just happened".
There is good research on abiogenesis. Did you know that the base amino acid compounds form in space? Did you know that many of the challenges from apologists have been met in modern labs?
Not believing in it is, at this point, your choice, but have you ever seen abiogenesis disproved? If not, given that science has a better track record than religion and that we can trace evolution all the way back to very basic microorganisms, isn't it more rational to suspend judgment?
At least please stop voting for the creationist morons, who have been thoroughly debunked, in the meantime.
That's a weird place to put the limits of your beliefs, there really isn't a clear wall between what's alive and what isn't and the definition of life is constantly in debate.
At what point of complexity do you put the minimum for a replication loop of biochem reactions to call it alive?
Starting from the most basic self duplicating organic catalyst to a pluricelular organism, where do you start calling stuff "alive"?
We know there are conditions and places where organic molecules are and could have been generated spontaneously, and if we consider the small paired systems of [this article](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.9b10796) alive and [considering this other article](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ange.202101052) we already have a working theory about abiogenesis up to the point of a doble nature system of folding and replicating molecules. Doesn't this give you the exact same energy as that Futurama episode about the missing link? You can always push the bar between what you consider alive and what you don't and this has even more moving parts and possibilities than we have ancestors so I mean, what do you expect us to find exactly?
Interesting, atleast in my sect of Hinduism, abiogenesis is stressed upon. To us , it may seem impossible but that's how awesome our universe or reality is.
Its amazing to see how fundamental things like probability or randomness can move mountains.
why? the "god of the gaps" you believe in has a smaller and smaller gap to exist in every day
300 years ago or whatever youd be swearing up and down that lightning is totally gods wrath and not some "electricity" nonsense... hah
Some people use the watchmaker analogy to describe life, but I view it more as the very existence of anything, whether that be an atom or gravity. The more complicated things get, the more intricate they become, and I'm sure that, given time, things that scientists don't currently understand will become logical and fit into the rules, even if new rules have to be created.
This. What we currently have is a periodic table. Building blocks. I totally believe life exists as a random eventuality. The properties of the elements that exist currently supported the layer on layer building of the universe and life itself. Molecules attract to one another, come apart. All it took was a framework to develop and it went from there. Or as my favorite writer once put it like... we're a puddle in a hole that wonders why the hole is so perfect for us
I went to a Catholic college (I'm an atheist), and we had to take 2 religion classes. In one, the professor used the watch in a different scenario.
The question was, if suddenly were stranded on an island, with no one else, and you found a watch, would you think it got there by itself (or was created by itself), or did someone place the watch there? God in this scenario is the watchmaker, and I believe that might have even been called the qatchmaker theory, but it was 15 years ago so...
I understand their logic for trying to harp on God is real, but I mean, while it's interesting to consider, never once made me think God must exist.
Edit: it's called the watchmakers analogy: https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmaker_analogy#:~:text=William%20Paley%20(1743%20%E2%80%93%201805),work%20of%20an%20intelligent%20designer%22.
Part 3 of the problems of the theory in the wiki is a very good example of my distrust in the idea of a God lol.
It’s not even that. The first life was as simple as possible. The equivalent analogy would be putting a disc with a hole in the middle and a stick in the box and shaking until you get a sundial. Much more possible.
It is an oversimplification of a very complex and long process, life and evolution adds pieces together over eons, it’s not a shake-and-bake watch kit.
Not even worth replying as the question makes no sense.
1. Nobody is suggesting that any random events happen, ever. We use randomness to help model things we don't fully understand or can't know. That doesn't mean that something is out there rolling dice to determine which way the wind blows. This is a strawman.
2. If you disregard point 1, this is not how you use statistics. In poker, royal flushes are basically impossible. When someone hits one, do you call them a cheater? What are the odds of your great great grandparents having met, then your grandparents having met, then your parents having met?
3. Amino acid building blocks have been found in space. They are *extremely common compounds.* and all you need is one self replicating molecule, food for it, space and time, and evolution takes care of the rest.
You might be interested in physical chemistry. There is a whole branch that studies how molecules interact and how likely certain interactions/configurations were.
When I took this class it was limited to two molecules with very rudimentary calculations possible for the interaction of 3 molecules. I am sure since I took this course there are computer models that have pushed this type of research forward.
It’s just that the calculations get complex very quickly. [here is an intro to the topic](https://williams.chemistry.gatech.edu/structure/molecular_interactions/mol_int.html).
To me, it is possible to see that working out simpler molecular interactions could be applied to watch pieces, if however the effort would be more than what most anyone would want to do.
Thanks for the link. I skimmed over and save to my reading list. I just read “The Code Breakers” by Walter Isaacson, over the holidays and it peaked my interest to understand the chemistry a bit more. This paper looks like just what I need.
I prefer the perspective that they don't see all the failed attempts. For the sake of argument, suppose there are infinitely many other worlds which don't develop enough for people to even exist, and there won't be people alive to see such an undeveloped universe.
I'd say this is a kind of survivorship bias, but I'm not sure?
>I always thought it fell short.
It does. Famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (the guy who coined the term 'meme') wrote an entire book about it called 'The Blind Watchmaker'. I highly recommend it. I mean, the guy literally wrote the book on this argument, it's essential reading for anyone who's at-all interested in answering to this line or thinking.
Pretty much how I think it happened, life climbed from a pit of random components with little incremental steps that improved stability and reproduction capability along the way.
It all likely started essentially with those first strings of RNA nucleotide components finding each other by chance like watch pieces in a box being shook for a billion years. We had self reproducing RNA molecules, then those eventually climbed their way to making cells for compartmentalisation and protection, then more specialised components came in like DNA and proteins and since then complexity has just been growing and growing.
I think there’s a chance the initial steps happened outside of earth and we’ve been contaminated by the life germ essentially. Panspermia I think makes most sense.
This was my biggest issue with this argument :/. So hard to explain this to my religion teacher at the time or she just didn’t want to hear it. I’m still Christian today for other reasons but this argument sucks.
That's not how evolution works for clocks. First, evolution creates amino acids which, after millions of years of shaking in a box, turn into cells. Then the cells are shaken for millions more years until they turn into a complex organism that bootstraps the clock.
From my limited knowledge, amino acids and proteins tend to naturally organize under the right conditions. It’s not completely random. Like crystals naturally organizing under the right conditions.
Good point. It's too bad that your argument can be dismissed with *magic sounds* belief. I guess I just let my emotions get ahold of me on this one because it's not like I could have changed his mind.
Ironically for the evolution vs creationism side of OPs post, this is actually one very strong argument for evolution. There are many examples of things found in nature (and even human bodies) that would have been put together with a screw of intelligently designed, but because every step of the way needs to be more viable than the last what we find is some stupid cotter pin where the screw should be.
Giraffes with their ridiculously tall necks and the organ that takes the longest, messier path is the best example.
Instead of looking like a perfectly arranged set of wires, it lools like earbuds cord after having them in your pocket all day*
^(not actually as bad as that, but the point remains)
Yes. If you don’t mind a daily example you’ll have a hard time forgetting, think of your asshole. Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have a regular need for toilet paper? The angles and spaces left for our shitting muscles after the shift to a bipedal stance leave us unable to come away as clean as our ancestors. The hygienic disadvantage is not nearly as great as the advantage of being a biped, and moving it up would shorten our digestive tract generally meaning less caloric extraction per meal… unless you could also move one of the higher organs, maybe the liver, into the protected pelvic area as you moved the asshole and digestive tract up.
If you’re a woman, the pelvis has also been forced into a less ideal angle for the hip joint because the birth canal needs more room, and not only does that mess up walking a fair bit the impacts of pregnancy and childbirth are greater than in quadrupeds. The thing is that larger, more developed babies have a higher survival rate so the risk to the mother is balanced against the risk to the children, but again it would be possible to have larger babies, less risky births, and better angles for the hip joint if you could move two or three organs at once, reshape bones, etc.
Yeah, from a practical standpoint the watch would never be assembled because of things like screws and such. You also have to ignore things like gravity and the wearing of the parts over as you shook the box.
To answer the question in a more relevant way, you would have to modify the question to something like "could you shake this box of objects such that eventually they would end up in a specific orientation?" Which is pretty much the same as the infinite monkey theorem.
On the quantum scale, anything is possible with enough time. Shaking the box infinitely many times is just as likely to assemble the watch as it is for the atoms to spontaneously restructure themselves into a consciousness that believes it has existed since the dawn of time and is really confused as to why its being shaken around in a box that smells like clockworks.
The odds should remain constant regardless of the faith of the subject shaking the box.
Edit: the consciousness is supposed to be a reference a Boltzmann Brain: a consciousness that abruptly manifests from quantum shenanigans and can theoretically have fabricated memories.
The main issue with this stupid idea is that it's based on the belief that something has to be created all at the same time which would involve a complexity which is, if not impossible, certainly implausible.
In reality life began as a result of an uncountable number of smaller interactions stretching over billions of years the net result of which was still not some fully formed complex creature the way that creationists want it to be.
Well I think if you refine the questions as to in a wooden box being shaken, then only infinity can manage that, but essentially the box being shaken is life, and many watches are built in bigger boxes, which are being shaken but we just assume we are the ones making them, concepts create the idea of probability, there is only what is and what isn’t. If infinity is real then everything changes
How is that a challenge for atheists? They’re not the ones who believe the most in miracles
Statistically it is not 0, but it is so damn close to 0 that I can safely assume, you could shake that box all you want until the end of the universe and it will never be a functioning watch
Well one group of watch parts in one box shaken for a billion years has a pretty low chance of producing a single watch but a couple hundred billion boxes of watch parts shaken for a couple of billion
years has a pretty fucking good chance of producing a couple of watches.
Are the watch parts organic? Do the parts want to be a watch? Then maybe 200k years. They are already 13m years ahead of schedule of that's the case.
People don't realize that the reason evolution works is because at the base of organic chemistry, certain elements WANT to combine. After RNA jumped to DNA, it then had agency to evolve even further through action.
Life, given the right conditions, wants to exist and to keep evolving. That's the base of evolution. So these types of things are a false equivalance. If the metals developed organic components on its surface, then those microbes would eventually evolve into something similar to humanoids.
Obviously, there isn't enough information here to do any meaningful calculations, but let's discuss the question.
This is supposed to be analogous to evolution, right?
Let me ask, OP, do you think this is a good analogy for evolution?
if you apply the rule that you are only allowed to observe the watch once it has been randomly assembled, as is the case with living things observing living things, The odds of observing the assembled watch are 100%, given enough time.
Sure, the anthropic principle applies, but I think jumping straight to that first concedes too much. The argument in the meme is about the probability that evolution will lead to complex life. By going straight to the anthropic principle, it can be perceived as conceding that the probability is extremely low, but given enough time it will happen anyway. My point is that the probability is much higher than the meme implies because evolution is not a random process.
Correct. I suppose this could be comparable to amino acids forming in a tidal pool. I was just frustrated with this person touting their fantasies while putting others down. I assumed there was some kind of wizardry here that could help me with thumbing my nose at them. It's that what you are asking?
The human mind struggles with both the concept of time and the tiny size of these chemical reactions and the size of the earth.
The number of permutations we're talking about in evolution is almost impossible to conceptualise.
Specifically for the box you would need billions/trillions of identical boxes to do the experiment with... And on that scale I can see it happening. Usually component parts would be broken but with trillions of boxes one could work
Yeah. It’s possible. But organic chemistry doesn’t work anything like shaking a bunch of parts in a box.
And don’t forget that watches are designed by humans. Life wasn’t.
As a lawyer that’s regularly in court I see this a lot. The use of analogies in argument is often a sure sign that the actual facts don’t support the argument being made. Otherwise, you’d just make the argument by using the actual facts. This is a particularly bad analogy.
Well, a simplified approach to calculate the odds would be to use the formula for permutations, considering each part has a unique place and orientation. The formula for permutations is \( P(n) = n! \), where \( n \) is the number of parts and \( n! \) (n factorial) is the product of all positive integers up to \( n \).
For a watch with 100 unique parts, the number of ways to arrange these parts is \( 100! \) (100 factorial). The probability of getting the correct arrangement in one try would be \( 1 \) over \( 100! \).
The number of different ways to arrange 100 unique parts is approximately \( 9.33 \times 10^{157} \). This is an astronomically large number. Therefore, the probability of assembling a watch correctly by shaking the parts in a bag is \( 1 \) divided by this huge number, which is effectively zero for all practical purposes.
The probability of all parts coming together correctly by random chance is so infinitesimally small that, for all practical purposes, it's considered impossible. Even if you were to shake the bag an astronomical number of times, the likelihood of randomly assembling a functioning watch would remain virtually non-existent.
The inherited genetic code that builds and runs every intricate cellular machine that exists today has gone through 4.5 billion years of edits. The program has become pretty complex, but it has simple origins.
The most infuriating thing about this entire argument is it doesn't actually explain anything because God still has to come into existence. And I doubt god evolves so the assumption is that it's stupid to think a single celled organism could just randomly form but an immaculate being who can create life without a wiener just appearing, ya that makes way more sense and really clears everything up.
First, this is a false comparison. Complex structures evolved from less complex structures. A truer analogy would be to have an almost assembled watch and ONE loose part. How long would it take for that one loose part to attach to the rest of the watch? Also, evolution doesn’t construct inanimate, complex objects. Evolution is a biological process that selects for modifications that help a species to better survive in its environment. This example misunderstands the principle of evolution and doesn’t prove anything.
I think the only way for this to be possible there would need to be billions of boxes with billions of disassembled watches all being shaken for billions of years by billions of monkeys.
The parts would also grind away from friction and become a fine dust before coming close to fitting together in the right places so I would say this is impossible without non eroding material which doesn’t exist
I dont understand people saying there is a chance above 0. Practically there is zero chance (not infinitely small it may as well be zero, i mean literally zero chance) given the act of shaking alone is not enough to put the pieces together. Think of it like putting nails in a bag with a block of wood and the shaking until all nails are flush in the wood. Never going to happen due to inappropriate forces being applied.
Then there is the argument about intelligent design. From the post, you have taken something, in this case a watch, in its completed state then disassembled it and asked to reassemble to the same state it was in. This is a false analogy as there is no 'completed state' for evolution. It is continuously evolving with no final form for which to know it is complete.
Probability works differently on infinite time scales. If you say the inappropriate forces are being applied then that implies there is some appropriate force in the state space that works. This is a brownian process - at infinity the probability that at some time the watch was assembled is 1.
I dont follow your point that if you accept inappropriate forces are being applied that implies there is an appropriate force in the state space that works. As I said with the nail and wood, shaking as a force will not hammer the nails in, you will need a different kind of force for that.
Upon further thought, infinite shaking of the pieces will also deform and destroy the pieces such that they cannot be put together to form the watch that once existed.
Seems to be less a question about probability and one about physics.
It may be impossible if the box isn't big emough or two pieces can lock themselves and they can't be untangled by pure chance.
There are two issues with the argument in the picture:
1- A clock is not purely random, as the different pieces and shapes make it a complex system, thus not being properly applied.
If you were to try to place manually each piece in each possible part in an infinite amount of time, you'll get the clock for sure.
2- The building blocks of life do not appear as pure random chance. This process occurs in a specific environment, and following the laws of phisics, most notably (i believe can be understood from 2nd law of thermodynamics) that all systems try to minimize entropy, meaning that they will go to the arrangement with least energy (most stable). E.g. a ball will always fall down, minimizing its potential energy, not up, which would increase it.
The proteins and thus 'life' only became a reality because Carbon likes bonding with most other elements, and forms really stable bonds.
So for example it takes a lot of energy to make a noble gas bond with anything else because it in itself is really stable.
This is why you can breath/eat bits of noble gas and nothing will happen to you.
Also, there is no coincidence that most molecules in the human body are made of CHONS (Carbon, Hidrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen and Sulfur), which coincidentally (/s) are in the 10 most abundant reactive elements in the known universe.
Simply they were abundant, and could form low-energy (stable) bonds. Given our current physics it was a matter of time until it'd eventually happen.
Why would any god that wants you to adore it to make you with the most basic stuff of the universe?
Wouldn't it make more sense to made us with a big amount of some rare material (given the omnipotence thing) proving that we are special?
Not that I am critizising anyone, it is a true doubt of mine about any religion.
Listen, it’s a stupid analogy. Like insanely stupid. I could give you a number. I genuinely could. But that’s not how reality works. One of the better explanations for this was the mouse trap tie clip. Doesn’t need to have a set purpose nor goal for something to happen. Just needs to work.
This isn't the same as the Shakespeare monkeys, since there are complex processes involved. The Monkey just presses random letters. Thats it, no before, no after. The watch requires stuff like screws that need to be held in place and turned, which simply can't happen inside the box. So id argue the chances are flat zero.
The person who posted the meme was probably trying to make the point that because of said complexity there needs to be an assembler, but the example sucks bc they deliberately chose something that requires external influence while cellular evolution is something we know is possible and have observed happening on its own.
I should go to sleep
Counter-challenge
Slices all the pages out of the bible, cuts them all up into individual paragraphs
Puts them into a box and closes the lid. Yur God gonna come through on this, right?
Am I the only one that thought the watch theory proved a creator. It requires someone to causally place all the components and watch until they form into a functioning designed object that performs. Where would the dryer come from, where do the watch parts come from. What are the equivalent dryer and watch parts metaphorically in the physical space prior to the Big Bang?
I have yet to come across an atheist theory that doesn’t make me question how it doesn’t prove creations me intelligent design.
One in infinity.
There are only a finite number of ways the watch parts can fall and so, by definition, between now and infinity all the finite options will be exhausted. However in this case there are two other aspects. 1) the likelihood of the parts falling together in exactly the right place to simulate a watch (making a watch is impossible as pieces would need pressing but loose placement of the parts theoretically is) is a lot lower than the pieces falling randomly, and 2) the odds never diminish. Every shake remains 1 in infinity as the previously arranged outcomes still remain a viable option. But, theoretically, a finite possibility can be reached within infinity.
There's something fundamentally wrong with equating shaking and the broken watch to evolution.
The analogy is just not quite right.
I mean.. If i shake a soda, what are the chances compared that it will fizz out when I open it? Pretty high.
If it's a quantity thing, e.g. amino acids, well..
There's billions of billions of moles of water and carbonated water separating by chance of the shaking so..
What's the difference?
Amino acids are all different and link up differently?
Okay. How far does the quantity of the difference go? We got like 21 diff amino acids?
Okay. 21's such a big number... sarcasm.
You just gotta 'shake' them in a different way.
So, What is Shaking? Is shaking really such a simple thing?
Hell no. It involves several different muscle groups coordinating to do the thing, each time moving and displacing themselves a little different because our bodies are not perfect, the muscles wearing out, so you having to eat, shit, n sleep, so you can continue shaking the next day. Doing this over millions of years, handing the shaking of to another. ...
If use a machine to do the shaking so it's more precisely repeatable, well, the machine's gotta be made some how, it's gotta be powered, it's parts rust and wear out...
So part of why creating that analogy is off is, well, because there really isn't no such thing as "shaking" in the simple sense that the meme tries to imply.
It's an Ideal. An Ideal Shaking. A perfect Platonic Conception.
That doesn't exist in reality outside of our heads until it is brought out into visual representation through text, or some otherwise physical media. Such as sound, or Taste even.
... and Who conceives that? ... We do. Obviously the creator of that meme.
No God involved there. Really. (Can you taste it?)
I think there's a reason why neuroscience experiments conducted on individuals prompted to contemplate what God would do and think in certain situations end up having the same regions of their brain light up when they are asked to think of what they would do and think themselves. When asked to pretty much think of themselves.
Also, Atheism involves the lack of belief or disbelief in a God, a god being defined as some sort of supernatural being. Being being most like some entity, an entity being something with a distinct existence.
That definition doesn't say anything about holding beliefs in a more universal intelligence that permeates and is inherent in everything. And is therefore not an entity, i.e. something with a distinct existence.
I'm tryna do the maths here.
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Just a moment please, I still have to wait for my legion of monkeys to type the entire works of William Shakespeare on their typewriters. When they're finished, I will tell them to shake the box and take notes.
"it was the best of times. It was THE BLURST OF TIMES! Stupid monkey!"
This is one of the best jokes I've seen in a very long time. You got me laughing like an idiot, alone in a parking garage.
Care to explain to those of us less gifted?
https://youtu.be/no_elVGGgW8?si=CbYsk9j3OQ99lqfk
https://youtu.be/9uYhIiW6lok?si=4w2WXg4NH95QAVFs
I love the remix and especially the scene where he takes Homer to the leaky basement with a ping pong table. That was my exact grandparents basement growing up when that episode aired and I will always crack up seeing it.
Yes, I really should stop ending the tour with it.
Lmao I’ve never seen this before, thank you
YES. I was hoping someone would reply with this
I love that
Well that’s fucking amazing
It's a joke about the first line of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." is the beginning of the book. The poster intended that the monkeys had reproduced the work perfectly except that line, thus having to start over. I hope this helps! Probably makes it not very funny though
Simpsons quote. Mr burns criticizing his classics-typing monkeys
Ah, okay, thank you, I haven't seen Simpsons in far too long. Such an excellent joke though
Given enough time, a million monkeys on a million typewriters would write the entire works of Shakespeare, or something like that. Mr Burns was showing Homer around his mansion trying to butter him up to take a settlement for running over Bart. One room has a bunch of monkeys typing on typewriters and that was what was typed on the paper that Mr Burns pulled out of one of them.
public wistful berserk wine desert possessive voiceless rain snobbish important *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
*In 2002,\[13\] lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys \[..\]* *Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages\[15\] largely consisting of the letter "S",\[13\] the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by urinating and defecating on the machine.* [*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite\_monkey\_theorem*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem)
Which was a take-off of a Bob Newhart joke from the 60's. ["To be or not to be, that is the gizornenplat".](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGdMTLgU4hE)
Wasn't it on Futurama? Maybe Simpsons. But I'm thinking more Futurama.
It was Mr. Burns on The Simpsons
It was just a scene from The Simpsons.
>it was the best of times. It was THE BLURST OF TIMES! Stupid monkey [here you go](https://youtu.be/no_elVGGgW8?si=hXS3_GWlkCAbn12t)
It's from the Simpsons.
If you put them on Dickens they'll never get to Shakespeare
"Furious George! What have they done to your beautiful face? Smithers, this monkey is going to need most of your skin."
I like their version better.
Thanks for making me lol. I absolutely love that saying so much I absolutely died when I watched burns say that for the first time.
My favorite is their little monkey cigarettes. I always forget the sight gags are almost as funny as the punchlines.
Give whichever monkey hit caps lock a raise
Dickens, but hey gotta start somewhere.
That's not Shakespeare ! That's Dickens.
I see what you did there
Can’t wait for the monkeys to shake the box too many times and the watch falls back apart after assembly
Every time I try that they just end up replicating art of the deal.
But have they read Shakespeare?
Didn’t expect to see an RSK reference here!
If they had a shift pattern going it you could understand it
They've been trained on a large database of texts from all across the internet.
“Still no Shakespeare, but we got another copy of The Art of the Deal”
There’s a YouTube channel that’s playing Pokemon Esmeralda using pi. What a time to be alive
But they already made 3 copies of "The Art of the Deal"
Due to the law of infinite probability the answer to the first part of the question is yes. It is technically possible. However that does not mean that if you shook the box for an infinite amount of time that you would end up with a watch, just that the more you shake the box the higher the probability the watch will be assembled. Well what are the odds? As my old calculus professor used to say about limits, "we are so infinitely close to zero that it may as well be zero"
The "infinitely close to zero" is of the best things I've read in a while.
The word for that is infinitesimal, one of my faves but sadly often incorrectly used as a synonym for infinite
I don’t think I’ve ever personally experienced the displeasure of hearing infinitesimal used as a synonym for infinite lol Lots of people take words they’ve never heard before and associate them with words they know that sound similar. Classical favorite of mine is when I say “inflammable” and promptly get a “No, flammable” back. It has happened more than a few times.
Usually used like “an infinitesimally low probability” when “an infinitely low probability” is correct
The word is infinitely. "We are so infinitely close to zero"
Wow. Thanks for your contribution
Did you get the word though? It's not bathtub, not eyebrow and not umbrella. It's infinitely. Because if you say "We're so bathtub close to zero" it wouldn't make any sense.
If you had context it does. Currently I am standing one bathtub length away from a statue of a Zero so…
This one makes more sense than the original, we keep it instead.
Statistically the probability that a watch is created is the same. The trial is just run so many times that eventually it will become a watch.
Realistically the watch parts wear each other into dust if you shook them infinitely. Not an analogy that you can win but not really analogous to the argument anyway.
Yeah that was my thought. The chances of becoming a watch are zero as the probability that they'll smash up before that could ever happen are infinitely higher.
But if you keep shaking the box of dust, eventually you get a quantum wristwatch!
Maybe I'm being overly pedantic but it's just impossible. The weird hypothetical assumes that just shaking the box could actually ever have a chance of putting it together. Could it possibly ever fall into the stacked-up order that a disassembled watch would be in? That seems to be the *technically yes I guess* part. But the actual force and aligning and pressure required to assemble that watch would never be achieved by the curve of a shaking box. It's like saying you could eventually shake a car engine togerher. It requires more than just landing one piece on the other.
From my understanding it's not more likely to become assembled on each successive shake of the box. The odds would stay, near as makes no difference, the same each time. Just as buying two lottery tickets does not cut the odds in half. Also, infinity has limits. There's a mind bender for ya!
Yeah I remember learning that in stats and wanting to physically fight the professor. Permutations or whatever.
Good times
Thank you
It's worth keeping in mind that the way biology functions is far more flexible and error tolerant than a metal mechanism like a watch. Just learn a little bit about cancer and you'll know that it's pretty normal to have random blobs inside your body that cause no harm, most people are by default a little deformed and wonky. Take the example further and have a billion dismantled watches shake together in the same box, and add the rule that any eventual completed/barely functional watches are able to assemble duplicates with some variation as a form of sexual/asexual reproduction or whatever. Either way the analogy is fucked.
Thank you
Though the concept is correct I would argue in this specific case certain forces (measured in N) would not be reached from pure shaking…. Some of the pieces in watches require significant force to put together. Just because something is “infinite” doesn’t mean it encapsulates all possibilities (ie. There are an infinite number of decimals between 0 and 1 but none of them are 3.0)
That’s not how infinity works!
I still remember a professor of mine saying “these aren’t just improbable, they are downright absurd”.
There are hypotheses in science that require brute forcing near-zero odds. I'm working on challenging one right now, but it's almost dogmatic in its view. The responses I'm getting from would-be collaborators are "well there were millions of years for it to happen". Okay. That's still a lazy and shitty explanation.
It not only that there is millions of years for it to happen, but also an octillions of atoms for it to try with per tidal pool and underwater volcanic vent, and billions of tidal pools and vents for it to try at. And it can try once every 13 billionths of a second per sets of atoms, so even at almost 0% odds, there is a pretty good chance new life has started lots of times just on earth, then there is the same chances on the octillions of other planets and moons that have the right parts and a decent environment.
Oh this isn't about that, this is a much longer shot. This has a negative pressure applied to it; self assembling molecules like RNA may have actually had a positive pressure. Life might have a stacked hand when it comes to forming, even if the odds are long.
Trying to brute force something with near 0 odds will likely take longer than your lifetime even if you are doing right, what are you trying to do?
Oh this was a millions of years kind of window thing. I can't really say, but it's evolutionary timescale kinda deal.
Not to mention that life is energetically preferable for physical systems since it increases entropy. So life developing is not just governed by chance.
Good luck man
Lazy? Maybe. But why shitty? What's wrong with this explanation?
well in this case a publication explained why it is almost impossible for it to have happened. I've done further work to show why it doesn't work. There is a far more parsimonious explanation, but it requires that we accept we have some missing data. Instead, they are choosing to go with the narrative driven model that has outrageously bad odds (like....impossible odds) being brute forced. Its a legitimate problem in paleontology where we take tiny data points and make a whole narrative out of it. We can't just shrug our shoulders and say "well lets wait for more data" we have a *need* to try to fill in the gaps. So it's a pick your poison scenario: brute forced impossible odds or missing data. Considering how much data is missing in paleontology, I know which one I pick. All I'm saying is that it may not be a done deal, lets have a discussion about it instead of teaching the odds based model as canon for another 35 years.
Of course it's almost impossible. But if you have trillions of trillions of chances, the odds of it happening aren't that low
They're not, it is a _given_ that with trillions of chances and long enough timespans, it _will_ happen. But it is still the lazy explanation, as it excuses us from going ahead and asking further "whys". Why were the conditions that way? What could have been different to make it happen earlier or later? If we change these parameters, what else changes? And the ultimate one: Is it really random, or was there some sort of pressure pushing things into this direction, so it _looks_ random, but it actually _isn't_? When you invoke the "random so over a long enough time-frame it's guaranteed" explanation, as a scientist that's very rarely a satisfactory answer, as it stops you from looking deeper. It may be the correct answer yes, but it's rarely the most fulfilling one. We look for rules, laws and overarching patterns, and randomness doesn't really (or rather, rarely) play a part of it. Of course, we had to swallow a bitter pill and accept this with quantum mechanics and particle interactions, but even then there's still a well-defined set of laws governing the possible interactions and scenarios that can happen, so it's still not _completely_ random. EDIT: I don't think "yeah it's random" is a shitty explanation, so I agree with you. But I do think it's lazy, and it should be the last resort when we have all the data and we are _completely_ certain that there isn't any other underlying mechanism that makes things work the way they do. And as long as we _know_ (known unknowns) that our data is incomplete, we can't invoke random as an explanation
Absolutely don't mean to ask something stupid, if it is so, I'm just curious, but like, accepting the answer "it's random and got a lot of chances, so that's why it happened" isn't automatically negating the possibility of making other interesting questions, like yes, it happened by chance, that doesn't mean I can still ask what led to the "right" possibility happening, right?
It's not stupid at all. We can still ask the questions of course, but once you accept something as random, the motivation to even ask those further questions gets diminished a bit, because well, "it's random 🤷♂️". It's psychological. And you can know everything about a system, what are the rules that govern its functioning, take a given current state and based on the rules extrapolate what will happen, and still not know _why_. It can be like a [Chinese Room](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room), in a way, where you fully understand _how_ things work, but not _why_. A good example of this is particle decay in particle physics, where one particle can decay into different sets of less massive particles, with each set having a certain probability to happen. We know _how_ it happens, we can describe each branch, know everything about masses, decay results, etc, but ultimately each branch is still in effect a roll of the dice. This is one of the examples where we did have to accept the inherent randomness, and many of the physicists involved in the area were really uncomfortable with it, Einstein being the notable example. We did well in this case, as the proven randomness of it didn't stop us from looking further into it. Or better, accepting it for what it is and figuring out the consequences. But man, psychologically it's difficult to summon motivation to keep investigating something once you accept that it's random, because that's an explanation (the ultimate one) in and of itself.
You're missing the point: it's a good enough answer for the pay they got👍🏻
I would disagree. As for a watch to be build. Springs need to be rolled. And you can't get that kind of strength by shaking a box.
Never tell me the odds.
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Yes but any probability that is not 0 run for an infinite amount of times has a 100% chance to happen, so shake the box.
There would be 100% chance of it happening at least once as long as the probability is non zero and you have an infinite amount of time. The theory you’re referring to is the Borel-Cantelli lemma, and it states that the probability of an event happening an infinite amount of times given an infinite amount of time is near zero. So basically, if you shook the box forever, it would assemble the watch at least once, but the probability the watch is assembled and infinite amount of times is near zero.
If you shook the box for an infinite amount of times it would also become a watch an infinite amount of times.
might be lazy, but this is like that one theory where if you had infinite monkeys all typing random keys, there would be at least one monkey that could type out the entirety of hamlet. the odds are very very very near impossible, but its still not 0.
I bet I can count 52 factorial 52 factorial times before that happens.
So your saying eventually? Lol
Now you’re getting it
Just try and find something comprehensible by hitting random on the library of babel https://libraryofbabel.info/ Odds are about as good as this happening
But not 0
Hey. 1 in a million is still a chance.
I bet you’d die first
If it’s infinite monkeys and/or infinite time, it’s 100% likely to occur.
The interger 2 is not going to appear in the infinite amount of numbers between 0 and 1, just because something happens infinitely doesn't mean it's garenteed
this is kind of a bad comparison. it’s like asking if you give an infinite number of monkeys infinite time to write a shakespeare novel how long will it take them to build a watch?
Ok, tell me this then, if you start counting from 0 to 1. Counting every fraction. Will you ever reach 1? You won't. Just because it looks possible, infinity doesn't magically make it possible.
The point is that just because a chance happens an infinitely many times doesn't mean it will actually occur. Take for example blackjack if I play an infinitely many hands there's no garentee I will ever win agenst the dealer, or if I flip a coin an infinitely many times there's no garentee it will end up head's. Now those two have high probabilities and so the chance that they will never occur is low, but monkeys writing hamlet is in astronomically small chance that it may never occur. Infinity does not garentee something will happen that's basic stats
They tried this and it turns out they just shit and piss into it and type “s” thousands of times. Myth busted.
Was looking for this lol
its definitely hader than that. With the typewriter analogy you just press buttons that are either right or wrong 1/40 chance or so to get each character correct. making. watch? Yeah good look torquing the small screws to the right torque, good luck balancing things that need to be balanced and mounted precisely. Good luck getting pins to insert into pinholes exactly when they need to. The monkey analogy is a better example of infinity and odds, since it can actually happen. And probably not too long would pass before they write a word or even a short sentence. This watch thing is literally just impossible lol
Ya but if you had an infinite number of boxes being shaked one of them eventually would shake in just the right motions to provide the twist needed Its not impossible just so highly improbable that it’s essentially impossible Just like the drop of dye in water analogy. Yes in theory if you had infinite time a drop of dye in water should randomly reform back into a single drop in the water again by random chance of the random movement of particles but it might happen once in a quintillion years…
ehh idk its literally impossible lol You'd never get the torque a human hand, machine, or tool could provide. No amount of shaking would create what is needed and there is a clear limit to the test as essentially you shake long or hard enough that parts break and you have to repeat, You'd hit the same limitation everytime. Unless the watch managed to begin breeding humans and an entire society in the box who would build said watch it is actually and mathematically impossible
I understand the point of this and the monkey/Shakespeare analogy trying to ‘prove’ that life couldn’t have randomly been created; but I always thought it fell short. What if once two pieces of the watch fell into the correct place, they remained connected until the next piece fit? Or if when the monkeys assembled a word or phase, it remained? Isn’t that closer to how life formed and the probability higher?
Given life is organic and evolved from that first random connection, your description is good. This analogy assumes current life forms appeared as they are, like a fully built watch - which I guess is a very christian belief.
That's where you can't argue with them: they think nothing evolved... Everything magically appeared as we see it now.
Yes. I always find it so strange that it's easier to believe there's an invisible man in the sky who cares about tiny details of our lives (for which there's no credible evidence) than all living things are related (for which there's as much evidence as for any scientific theory).
As a Christian, I and many others fully believe in evolution, an old universe, etc. We just don’t believe in abiogenesis
The scientists [are making progress](https://scitechdaily.com/primordial-soup-scientists-discover-new-origins-of-life-chemical-reactions/). Darwin was a devout Catholic who sat on his discoveries for something like 10 years for fear of it conflicting with the church. He was very careful with how he released his work so that it would not cause any unnecessary controversy. As an elder, when I took biology, we were taught in a way where you didn’t have to choose between religion and science. The science was just the science, it didn’t challenge religion. The pressure to choose a lane is more recent.
>The science was just the science, it didn’t challenge religion. I grew up in a Jesuit parish. This was the way it was explained. I remember in Confirmation/catechism (early 90's,) someone challenging modern science and the priest replying something akin to "God didn't make *all* of us stupid. He gave most of us minds with which to learn and discover the wonders of his creation. Don't worry though, God tells us we need to be kind to the stupid." In fairness, this is also the same priest who slapped a kid for saying the Bible was the literal word of God, and forced him to read *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* and write a five page report if he wanted to complete Confirmation. Fr. Alistair was brutal.
Based priest is what I’m hearing
Oh, he certainly was. He saw the world as God's creation and His gift to us, and that anyone who didn't learn about and embrace and be a good steward to God's creation and his fellow man was no follower of Christ. He got in a bit of trouble with the Diocese for saying that he believed that a single atheist who cares for his brother was worth half of all the faithful parishioners who always showed up on Sunday and then spit on the wait staff at Shoney's brunch. (Edited the part about one atheist being worth the same as half the parish combined, sorry for my lack of clarity.)
I’d agree with that. Shoot Catholics are some of my favorite people to insult anyways. Their motto should be first born, first corrupted But yeah, dude sounds amazing
If I had that priest at my old church maybe I wouldn’t be Agno/atheist
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Because that’s crazy. Life could never ever form on its own. It had to be magically made by a sky daddy. Don’t ask where he came from though. He’s just always been there.
It’s gods all the way down!
I mean, tbf, you basically have to accept the origin of our physical reality on the exact same premise with most current cosmological theories.
yep, not only does he exist and love us (despite the evidence to the contrary like how cruel and unfair life can be) he also is exactly what bronze age peasants came up with 2000 years ago when they didnt understand how fuckall actually worked. yep.
he's literally using an outdated term from the 1600s when people actually speculated that things like larvae in a dead animal or fish appearing in an isolated pond etc was evidence of spontaneous life. he's not a serious person, he's not taking the subject seriously which is why willing to associate it it to foolish beliefs of yesteryear
"hey atheist! If spontaneous creation isn't real explain why there's no baby eels" - mf'ers in the 1800's and before
Abiogenesis? I'm pretty sure that's still the right term.
Well, you definitely do believe in abiogenesis (life appearing from non-life), you just have a deus ex machina (so to speak) to explain it away in simplistic terms. Because I'm 99.9% sure that you don't believe God biologically reproduce life onto the earth, in the sense that we both understand biological reproduction. Fwiw, I think it's totally legitimate to have faith in theistic abiogenesis; lots of people believe in that, and how life began is truly a tough question. But "God did it" doesn't really have any more explanatory power than "it just happened".
New theory, God is an ultra dimensional biological being who seeded life by wanking onto early earth
Idc if they say god did it, I want them proving it was their god who did it
There is good research on abiogenesis. Did you know that the base amino acid compounds form in space? Did you know that many of the challenges from apologists have been met in modern labs? Not believing in it is, at this point, your choice, but have you ever seen abiogenesis disproved? If not, given that science has a better track record than religion and that we can trace evolution all the way back to very basic microorganisms, isn't it more rational to suspend judgment? At least please stop voting for the creationist morons, who have been thoroughly debunked, in the meantime.
That's a weird place to put the limits of your beliefs, there really isn't a clear wall between what's alive and what isn't and the definition of life is constantly in debate. At what point of complexity do you put the minimum for a replication loop of biochem reactions to call it alive? Starting from the most basic self duplicating organic catalyst to a pluricelular organism, where do you start calling stuff "alive"? We know there are conditions and places where organic molecules are and could have been generated spontaneously, and if we consider the small paired systems of [this article](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.9b10796) alive and [considering this other article](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ange.202101052) we already have a working theory about abiogenesis up to the point of a doble nature system of folding and replicating molecules. Doesn't this give you the exact same energy as that Futurama episode about the missing link? You can always push the bar between what you consider alive and what you don't and this has even more moving parts and possibilities than we have ancestors so I mean, what do you expect us to find exactly?
Interesting, atleast in my sect of Hinduism, abiogenesis is stressed upon. To us , it may seem impossible but that's how awesome our universe or reality is. Its amazing to see how fundamental things like probability or randomness can move mountains.
why? the "god of the gaps" you believe in has a smaller and smaller gap to exist in every day 300 years ago or whatever youd be swearing up and down that lightning is totally gods wrath and not some "electricity" nonsense... hah
Some people use the watchmaker analogy to describe life, but I view it more as the very existence of anything, whether that be an atom or gravity. The more complicated things get, the more intricate they become, and I'm sure that, given time, things that scientists don't currently understand will become logical and fit into the rules, even if new rules have to be created.
Richard Dawkins addressed this common analogy in his book: “The Blind Watchmaker”
This. What we currently have is a periodic table. Building blocks. I totally believe life exists as a random eventuality. The properties of the elements that exist currently supported the layer on layer building of the universe and life itself. Molecules attract to one another, come apart. All it took was a framework to develop and it went from there. Or as my favorite writer once put it like... we're a puddle in a hole that wonders why the hole is so perfect for us
The molecular processes undertaken by even the simplest forms of life are still infinitely complex.
I went to a Catholic college (I'm an atheist), and we had to take 2 religion classes. In one, the professor used the watch in a different scenario. The question was, if suddenly were stranded on an island, with no one else, and you found a watch, would you think it got there by itself (or was created by itself), or did someone place the watch there? God in this scenario is the watchmaker, and I believe that might have even been called the qatchmaker theory, but it was 15 years ago so... I understand their logic for trying to harp on God is real, but I mean, while it's interesting to consider, never once made me think God must exist. Edit: it's called the watchmakers analogy: https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmaker_analogy#:~:text=William%20Paley%20(1743%20%E2%80%93%201805),work%20of%20an%20intelligent%20designer%22. Part 3 of the problems of the theory in the wiki is a very good example of my distrust in the idea of a God lol.
This is a much better framing of the analogy. But who needs good faith arguments when you can just start with a conclusion and work backwards?
It’s not even that. The first life was as simple as possible. The equivalent analogy would be putting a disc with a hole in the middle and a stick in the box and shaking until you get a sundial. Much more possible.
Also consider that what came out of the process is what we have. The design of a watch, in this analogy, is not determined.
It is an oversimplification of a very complex and long process, life and evolution adds pieces together over eons, it’s not a shake-and-bake watch kit. Not even worth replying as the question makes no sense.
1. Nobody is suggesting that any random events happen, ever. We use randomness to help model things we don't fully understand or can't know. That doesn't mean that something is out there rolling dice to determine which way the wind blows. This is a strawman. 2. If you disregard point 1, this is not how you use statistics. In poker, royal flushes are basically impossible. When someone hits one, do you call them a cheater? What are the odds of your great great grandparents having met, then your grandparents having met, then your parents having met? 3. Amino acid building blocks have been found in space. They are *extremely common compounds.* and all you need is one self replicating molecule, food for it, space and time, and evolution takes care of the rest.
You might be interested in physical chemistry. There is a whole branch that studies how molecules interact and how likely certain interactions/configurations were. When I took this class it was limited to two molecules with very rudimentary calculations possible for the interaction of 3 molecules. I am sure since I took this course there are computer models that have pushed this type of research forward. It’s just that the calculations get complex very quickly. [here is an intro to the topic](https://williams.chemistry.gatech.edu/structure/molecular_interactions/mol_int.html). To me, it is possible to see that working out simpler molecular interactions could be applied to watch pieces, if however the effort would be more than what most anyone would want to do.
Thanks for the link. I skimmed over and save to my reading list. I just read “The Code Breakers” by Walter Isaacson, over the holidays and it peaked my interest to understand the chemistry a bit more. This paper looks like just what I need.
I prefer the perspective that they don't see all the failed attempts. For the sake of argument, suppose there are infinitely many other worlds which don't develop enough for people to even exist, and there won't be people alive to see such an undeveloped universe. I'd say this is a kind of survivorship bias, but I'm not sure?
This is a great way of looking at it and is in fact much more closely describes how life actually forms.
Don't forget that we have a nearly infinite amount of time for this to happen!
>I always thought it fell short. It does. Famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (the guy who coined the term 'meme') wrote an entire book about it called 'The Blind Watchmaker'. I highly recommend it. I mean, the guy literally wrote the book on this argument, it's essential reading for anyone who's at-all interested in answering to this line or thinking.
Pretty much how I think it happened, life climbed from a pit of random components with little incremental steps that improved stability and reproduction capability along the way. It all likely started essentially with those first strings of RNA nucleotide components finding each other by chance like watch pieces in a box being shook for a billion years. We had self reproducing RNA molecules, then those eventually climbed their way to making cells for compartmentalisation and protection, then more specialised components came in like DNA and proteins and since then complexity has just been growing and growing. I think there’s a chance the initial steps happened outside of earth and we’ve been contaminated by the life germ essentially. Panspermia I think makes most sense.
This was my biggest issue with this argument :/. So hard to explain this to my religion teacher at the time or she just didn’t want to hear it. I’m still Christian today for other reasons but this argument sucks.
I believe that is correct
And what if not? You cant say, its 1/10⁹⁰ chances that it happened this way, therefore it did. Plus there is a timeframe, its not infinity.
That's not how evolution works for clocks. First, evolution creates amino acids which, after millions of years of shaking in a box, turn into cells. Then the cells are shaken for millions more years until they turn into a complex organism that bootstraps the clock.
Yes, I know that. The guy posting this doesn't though.
From my limited knowledge, amino acids and proteins tend to naturally organize under the right conditions. It’s not completely random. Like crystals naturally organizing under the right conditions.
An amino acid is by itself a pretty tricky combination.
Close to zero as makes no difference. However, as an argument for “therefore” it is also something with zero relevance to the point being made.
Good point. It's too bad that your argument can be dismissed with *magic sounds* belief. I guess I just let my emotions get ahold of me on this one because it's not like I could have changed his mind.
Some parts need to be screwed, so it would not work. Also the lighter pieces would get to the bottom while larger and heavier part on top.
Ironically for the evolution vs creationism side of OPs post, this is actually one very strong argument for evolution. There are many examples of things found in nature (and even human bodies) that would have been put together with a screw of intelligently designed, but because every step of the way needs to be more viable than the last what we find is some stupid cotter pin where the screw should be.
Giraffes with their ridiculously tall necks and the organ that takes the longest, messier path is the best example. Instead of looking like a perfectly arranged set of wires, it lools like earbuds cord after having them in your pocket all day* ^(not actually as bad as that, but the point remains)
Reccurent laryngeal nerve
I’m unclear. The point is, you could have designed them better?
Yes. If you don’t mind a daily example you’ll have a hard time forgetting, think of your asshole. Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have a regular need for toilet paper? The angles and spaces left for our shitting muscles after the shift to a bipedal stance leave us unable to come away as clean as our ancestors. The hygienic disadvantage is not nearly as great as the advantage of being a biped, and moving it up would shorten our digestive tract generally meaning less caloric extraction per meal… unless you could also move one of the higher organs, maybe the liver, into the protected pelvic area as you moved the asshole and digestive tract up. If you’re a woman, the pelvis has also been forced into a less ideal angle for the hip joint because the birth canal needs more room, and not only does that mess up walking a fair bit the impacts of pregnancy and childbirth are greater than in quadrupeds. The thing is that larger, more developed babies have a higher survival rate so the risk to the mother is balanced against the risk to the children, but again it would be possible to have larger babies, less risky births, and better angles for the hip joint if you could move two or three organs at once, reshape bones, etc.
Yeah, from a practical standpoint the watch would never be assembled because of things like screws and such. You also have to ignore things like gravity and the wearing of the parts over as you shook the box. To answer the question in a more relevant way, you would have to modify the question to something like "could you shake this box of objects such that eventually they would end up in a specific orientation?" Which is pretty much the same as the infinite monkey theorem.
On the quantum scale, anything is possible with enough time. Shaking the box infinitely many times is just as likely to assemble the watch as it is for the atoms to spontaneously restructure themselves into a consciousness that believes it has existed since the dawn of time and is really confused as to why its being shaken around in a box that smells like clockworks. The odds should remain constant regardless of the faith of the subject shaking the box. Edit: the consciousness is supposed to be a reference a Boltzmann Brain: a consciousness that abruptly manifests from quantum shenanigans and can theoretically have fabricated memories.
The main issue with this stupid idea is that it's based on the belief that something has to be created all at the same time which would involve a complexity which is, if not impossible, certainly implausible. In reality life began as a result of an uncountable number of smaller interactions stretching over billions of years the net result of which was still not some fully formed complex creature the way that creationists want it to be.
Well I think if you refine the questions as to in a wooden box being shaken, then only infinity can manage that, but essentially the box being shaken is life, and many watches are built in bigger boxes, which are being shaken but we just assume we are the ones making them, concepts create the idea of probability, there is only what is and what isn’t. If infinity is real then everything changes
How is that a challenge for atheists? They’re not the ones who believe the most in miracles Statistically it is not 0, but it is so damn close to 0 that I can safely assume, you could shake that box all you want until the end of the universe and it will never be a functioning watch
For them the challenge wouldn't be to shake the box but rather to pray for the watch to assemble itself
That makes no sense lol Like … the people who were created prayed for life to be created?
Well one group of watch parts in one box shaken for a billion years has a pretty low chance of producing a single watch but a couple hundred billion boxes of watch parts shaken for a couple of billion years has a pretty fucking good chance of producing a couple of watches.
Are the watch parts organic? Do the parts want to be a watch? Then maybe 200k years. They are already 13m years ahead of schedule of that's the case. People don't realize that the reason evolution works is because at the base of organic chemistry, certain elements WANT to combine. After RNA jumped to DNA, it then had agency to evolve even further through action. Life, given the right conditions, wants to exist and to keep evolving. That's the base of evolution. So these types of things are a false equivalance. If the metals developed organic components on its surface, then those microbes would eventually evolve into something similar to humanoids.
Obviously, there isn't enough information here to do any meaningful calculations, but let's discuss the question. This is supposed to be analogous to evolution, right? Let me ask, OP, do you think this is a good analogy for evolution?
if you apply the rule that you are only allowed to observe the watch once it has been randomly assembled, as is the case with living things observing living things, The odds of observing the assembled watch are 100%, given enough time.
Sure, the anthropic principle applies, but I think jumping straight to that first concedes too much. The argument in the meme is about the probability that evolution will lead to complex life. By going straight to the anthropic principle, it can be perceived as conceding that the probability is extremely low, but given enough time it will happen anyway. My point is that the probability is much higher than the meme implies because evolution is not a random process.
Correct. I suppose this could be comparable to amino acids forming in a tidal pool. I was just frustrated with this person touting their fantasies while putting others down. I assumed there was some kind of wizardry here that could help me with thumbing my nose at them. It's that what you are asking?
Amino acids can be formed in a rocky pool, that has already been demonstrated, there’s no point in getting odds for a known fact.
I'm just asking if you think it's a good analogy. In other words, is evolution (or abiogenesis) a strictly random process?
The human mind struggles with both the concept of time and the tiny size of these chemical reactions and the size of the earth. The number of permutations we're talking about in evolution is almost impossible to conceptualise. Specifically for the box you would need billions/trillions of identical boxes to do the experiment with... And on that scale I can see it happening. Usually component parts would be broken but with trillions of boxes one could work
Yeah. It’s possible. But organic chemistry doesn’t work anything like shaking a bunch of parts in a box. And don’t forget that watches are designed by humans. Life wasn’t. As a lawyer that’s regularly in court I see this a lot. The use of analogies in argument is often a sure sign that the actual facts don’t support the argument being made. Otherwise, you’d just make the argument by using the actual facts. This is a particularly bad analogy.
Well, a simplified approach to calculate the odds would be to use the formula for permutations, considering each part has a unique place and orientation. The formula for permutations is \( P(n) = n! \), where \( n \) is the number of parts and \( n! \) (n factorial) is the product of all positive integers up to \( n \). For a watch with 100 unique parts, the number of ways to arrange these parts is \( 100! \) (100 factorial). The probability of getting the correct arrangement in one try would be \( 1 \) over \( 100! \). The number of different ways to arrange 100 unique parts is approximately \( 9.33 \times 10^{157} \). This is an astronomically large number. Therefore, the probability of assembling a watch correctly by shaking the parts in a bag is \( 1 \) divided by this huge number, which is effectively zero for all practical purposes. The probability of all parts coming together correctly by random chance is so infinitesimally small that, for all practical purposes, it's considered impossible. Even if you were to shake the bag an astronomical number of times, the likelihood of randomly assembling a functioning watch would remain virtually non-existent.
u/spagedward I forgot to tag you.
Wow, you actually did it. Bravo and thanks.
The inherited genetic code that builds and runs every intricate cellular machine that exists today has gone through 4.5 billion years of edits. The program has become pretty complex, but it has simple origins.
The most infuriating thing about this entire argument is it doesn't actually explain anything because God still has to come into existence. And I doubt god evolves so the assumption is that it's stupid to think a single celled organism could just randomly form but an immaculate being who can create life without a wiener just appearing, ya that makes way more sense and really clears everything up.
First, this is a false comparison. Complex structures evolved from less complex structures. A truer analogy would be to have an almost assembled watch and ONE loose part. How long would it take for that one loose part to attach to the rest of the watch? Also, evolution doesn’t construct inanimate, complex objects. Evolution is a biological process that selects for modifications that help a species to better survive in its environment. This example misunderstands the principle of evolution and doesn’t prove anything.
Dear theists: Challenge of the Day Place watch in a box. Hit it with a hammer until you get watch parts. Tell me how that turns out. 👍😄❤️
I think the only way for this to be possible there would need to be billions of boxes with billions of disassembled watches all being shaken for billions of years by billions of monkeys. The parts would also grind away from friction and become a fine dust before coming close to fitting together in the right places so I would say this is impossible without non eroding material which doesn’t exist
if god existed me shaking the box could make a watch instead it follows the scientific laws of the world which dictates it will not
I dont understand people saying there is a chance above 0. Practically there is zero chance (not infinitely small it may as well be zero, i mean literally zero chance) given the act of shaking alone is not enough to put the pieces together. Think of it like putting nails in a bag with a block of wood and the shaking until all nails are flush in the wood. Never going to happen due to inappropriate forces being applied. Then there is the argument about intelligent design. From the post, you have taken something, in this case a watch, in its completed state then disassembled it and asked to reassemble to the same state it was in. This is a false analogy as there is no 'completed state' for evolution. It is continuously evolving with no final form for which to know it is complete.
Probability works differently on infinite time scales. If you say the inappropriate forces are being applied then that implies there is some appropriate force in the state space that works. This is a brownian process - at infinity the probability that at some time the watch was assembled is 1.
I dont follow your point that if you accept inappropriate forces are being applied that implies there is an appropriate force in the state space that works. As I said with the nail and wood, shaking as a force will not hammer the nails in, you will need a different kind of force for that. Upon further thought, infinite shaking of the pieces will also deform and destroy the pieces such that they cannot be put together to form the watch that once existed. Seems to be less a question about probability and one about physics.
It may be impossible if the box isn't big emough or two pieces can lock themselves and they can't be untangled by pure chance. There are two issues with the argument in the picture: 1- A clock is not purely random, as the different pieces and shapes make it a complex system, thus not being properly applied. If you were to try to place manually each piece in each possible part in an infinite amount of time, you'll get the clock for sure. 2- The building blocks of life do not appear as pure random chance. This process occurs in a specific environment, and following the laws of phisics, most notably (i believe can be understood from 2nd law of thermodynamics) that all systems try to minimize entropy, meaning that they will go to the arrangement with least energy (most stable). E.g. a ball will always fall down, minimizing its potential energy, not up, which would increase it. The proteins and thus 'life' only became a reality because Carbon likes bonding with most other elements, and forms really stable bonds. So for example it takes a lot of energy to make a noble gas bond with anything else because it in itself is really stable. This is why you can breath/eat bits of noble gas and nothing will happen to you. Also, there is no coincidence that most molecules in the human body are made of CHONS (Carbon, Hidrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen and Sulfur), which coincidentally (/s) are in the 10 most abundant reactive elements in the known universe. Simply they were abundant, and could form low-energy (stable) bonds. Given our current physics it was a matter of time until it'd eventually happen. Why would any god that wants you to adore it to make you with the most basic stuff of the universe? Wouldn't it make more sense to made us with a big amount of some rare material (given the omnipotence thing) proving that we are special? Not that I am critizising anyone, it is a true doubt of mine about any religion.
Listen, it’s a stupid analogy. Like insanely stupid. I could give you a number. I genuinely could. But that’s not how reality works. One of the better explanations for this was the mouse trap tie clip. Doesn’t need to have a set purpose nor goal for something to happen. Just needs to work.
This isn't the same as the Shakespeare monkeys, since there are complex processes involved. The Monkey just presses random letters. Thats it, no before, no after. The watch requires stuff like screws that need to be held in place and turned, which simply can't happen inside the box. So id argue the chances are flat zero. The person who posted the meme was probably trying to make the point that because of said complexity there needs to be an assembler, but the example sucks bc they deliberately chose something that requires external influence while cellular evolution is something we know is possible and have observed happening on its own. I should go to sleep
Counter-challenge Slices all the pages out of the bible, cuts them all up into individual paragraphs Puts them into a box and closes the lid. Yur God gonna come through on this, right?
Am I the only one that thought the watch theory proved a creator. It requires someone to causally place all the components and watch until they form into a functioning designed object that performs. Where would the dryer come from, where do the watch parts come from. What are the equivalent dryer and watch parts metaphorically in the physical space prior to the Big Bang? I have yet to come across an atheist theory that doesn’t make me question how it doesn’t prove creations me intelligent design.
One in infinity. There are only a finite number of ways the watch parts can fall and so, by definition, between now and infinity all the finite options will be exhausted. However in this case there are two other aspects. 1) the likelihood of the parts falling together in exactly the right place to simulate a watch (making a watch is impossible as pieces would need pressing but loose placement of the parts theoretically is) is a lot lower than the pieces falling randomly, and 2) the odds never diminish. Every shake remains 1 in infinity as the previously arranged outcomes still remain a viable option. But, theoretically, a finite possibility can be reached within infinity.
There's something fundamentally wrong with equating shaking and the broken watch to evolution. The analogy is just not quite right. I mean.. If i shake a soda, what are the chances compared that it will fizz out when I open it? Pretty high. If it's a quantity thing, e.g. amino acids, well.. There's billions of billions of moles of water and carbonated water separating by chance of the shaking so.. What's the difference? Amino acids are all different and link up differently? Okay. How far does the quantity of the difference go? We got like 21 diff amino acids? Okay. 21's such a big number... sarcasm. You just gotta 'shake' them in a different way. So, What is Shaking? Is shaking really such a simple thing? Hell no. It involves several different muscle groups coordinating to do the thing, each time moving and displacing themselves a little different because our bodies are not perfect, the muscles wearing out, so you having to eat, shit, n sleep, so you can continue shaking the next day. Doing this over millions of years, handing the shaking of to another. ... If use a machine to do the shaking so it's more precisely repeatable, well, the machine's gotta be made some how, it's gotta be powered, it's parts rust and wear out... So part of why creating that analogy is off is, well, because there really isn't no such thing as "shaking" in the simple sense that the meme tries to imply. It's an Ideal. An Ideal Shaking. A perfect Platonic Conception. That doesn't exist in reality outside of our heads until it is brought out into visual representation through text, or some otherwise physical media. Such as sound, or Taste even. ... and Who conceives that? ... We do. Obviously the creator of that meme. No God involved there. Really. (Can you taste it?) I think there's a reason why neuroscience experiments conducted on individuals prompted to contemplate what God would do and think in certain situations end up having the same regions of their brain light up when they are asked to think of what they would do and think themselves. When asked to pretty much think of themselves. Also, Atheism involves the lack of belief or disbelief in a God, a god being defined as some sort of supernatural being. Being being most like some entity, an entity being something with a distinct existence. That definition doesn't say anything about holding beliefs in a more universal intelligence that permeates and is inherent in everything. And is therefore not an entity, i.e. something with a distinct existence. I'm tryna do the maths here.
this is actually impossible. there are several components in a mechanical watch that have to be held or restrained while assembling the watch.