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Comment by memling | Hacker News Reader

> Any life form that has reached the cognitive capability to reason about itself will be amazed by the sheer "coincidence" of their habitat. "wow, isn't it amazing that our planet's atmosphere is composed of the very ammonia we need to survive in?"

Isn't this a non sequitur? Whether any life form would wonder about its existence (probable or otherwise) has no bearing whatever on whether it evolved or was designed or specially created.

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We should not be surprised that the environment we find ourselves in is so seemingly well-suited to the flourishing of life. I believe the grandparent post was saying this as a response to the idea that things are too improbably perfectly-suited for us. Far from being a non-sequitur, it is almost stating a tautology. The environment we find ourselves in is the one that has given rise to us, with our ability to think about these things.

I'm sure there is a Douglas Adams passage that illustrates this but I can't remember it.

What I mean is that how one <i>feels</i> about his existence has no bearing on how one came to exist. That is why it is a non-sequitur. (One is reminded that the rose is not special because it is rare.)

Now the question of exactly how improbable is more relevant, and this is why people care about making primordial soups more easily: everyone agrees that abiogenesis is improbable.

Since chemistry is not selective (or at least no one has demonstrated a parallel mechanism for natural selection that applies to chemistry), our tools are to somehow find ways to change random chance to dependent probabilities and to find enough time for the chemistry to happen. While we have a fairly good grasp of the time limits, it's the probability that is harder to quantify.

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