2 of 6
Consider Yahtzee. It's a game played with six dice. While there are many ways to score points, the highest score is awarded for rolling six of a kind, called a "Yahtzee." Yet this is not a game of pure chance. On each turn, a player gets three throws of the dice, and after each throw he can select which dice he will re-throw. If, for example, after the first throw there are two threes on the table, the player can elect to re-throw the other four dice; if after the second throw there are now four threes on the table, the player has one more throw to produce a Yahtzee.
The example has a single point. Speaking from a purely statistical point of view, the odds of rolling six of a kind on any single throw is only one in 66—a very small number. However, the odds of throwing six of a kind given the provision for cumulative selection are very much better. Yahtzees are typically rolled once or twice a game. That's the kind of power which drives evolution to create organisms with the appearance of exquisite design, but without a designer. Now there are many critics who argue that this sort of analogy begs all sorts of crucial questions, the most common being, "Who's doing the selection if not an intelligent designer?" But this is not Behe's objection.
There is, however, one catch. The dice analogy only works if we assume the existence of what Dawkins calls "replicators" (i.e., living organisms which are capable of reproduction). Without something to accumulate the benefits of chance after each roll (in biological terms, after each generation), the process of cumulative selection can't begin and we are back to pure chance.
Dawkins never tries to hide this point of simple logic—no accumulation without an accumulator. Nor does he hide the fact that it would be question-begging to give a "Darwinian" explanation for the origin of the first replicators. Again, cumulative selection only works if we assume the existence of organisms that can benefit from small acts of random kindness. Here the intellectually fulfilled atheist must rely on pure luck. Obviously, one's "fulfillment" will vary inversely with the amount of luck required. So how much luck does it take for the original replicators to simply "poof" into existence? And is there enough luck in the atheists' account from which to draw?
Before looking at the numbers, it is important to emphasize that Dawkins and Behe agree on the proper method for answering these questions. First, questions about the amount of pure luck required to biologically account for the origins of life both can and must be quantified. Second, science gives us a pretty good idea of how much quantifiable luck is available.
Yet, given these shared assumptions, Behe and Dawkins come to radically different conclusions. Dawkins' argument in The Blind Watchmaker goes like this: "There are probably more than a billion billion available planets in the universe. If each of them lasts as long as Earth, that gives us about a billion billion billion planet-years to play with." He then adds with obvious satisfaction, "That will do nicely!" However, he also warns that "we haven't the faintest hope of duplicating such a fantastically lucky, miraculous event as the origin of life in our laboratory experiments." Thus, he argues that purely theoretical arguments become scientifically justifiable.
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