Jeff Barr wrote:
> Jeff Bone says:
>
> > Evolution works slowly.
>
> So slowly in fact, that a lot of people are now asking if the earth is
> even old enough to support the diversity of species that we see*.
Three decades ago, Frank Salisbury of Utah State University described the
odds this way: "Imagine one hundred million trillion planets, each with an
ocean with lots of DNA fragments that reproduce one million times per
second, with a mutation occurring each time. In four billion years, it would
still take trillions of universes to produce a single gene -- if they got
lucky."
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/marvinolasky/mo20010410.shtml
There was an interesting SF book called "Paths to OtherWhere" by James P.
Hogan. It uses the "multiverse" physics speculation with a twist -- DNA
that somehow works as a cross-multiverse infinite parallel machine. Thus,
only one of the unlimited number of universes has to get lucky with an eye
for all the universes to start churning out the code for an eye.
Peace
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