Organodynamics	Grant Holland, Apr 25, 2014
Slide: The False Assumption of Independence	Nav Refs Top Bottom Previous Next 90m 90m 45m 45m 25m 25m
It is typical in science, and social discourse in general, for the assumption of stochastic independence to be made unwittingly and unconsciously. This unsubstantiated assumption is often unwarranted – and just plain wrong. Part of the reason for this rush to assume independence is: If stochastic independence is the case for a situation, the probabilities can be calculated (product of probabilities), and do not have to be observed. This makes things enormously easier. Thus, there is a bias toward desiring for independence. Another false premise is to believe that randomness is a binary condition – either off or on. Something is random or it is deterministic. There can be no “partial randomness.” But, as information theory shows, this is false. There is, in fact, a continuum of possible values of randomness. It is measured by entropy and by mutual information, and the other entropic functionals.	Astronomers Hoyle and Wickramasinghe on the improbability of life originating by a random process… …This means that with a supply of all the amino acids supposedly given, the probability of a random linking of 300 of them yielding a particular enzyme is as little as The bacteria present on Earth in its early days required about 200 such enzymes, and the chance that a random shuffling of already-available amino acids happens to combine so as to yield all the required 2000 enzymes is 2000! [10^-250]^2000 which works out at odds of one part in about 10^5000,000, with the factorial hardly making any difference, large as it might seem. A probability as small as this cannot be contemplated. So to a believer in the paradigm of the warm little pond there has to be a mistake in the argument. [Hoyle and Wickramasinghe 2001]
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe’s mistake is that they assumed stochastic independence. This is seen in their calculation, where they calculate the probability of the joint event of 300 amino acids linking to be the product of their probabilities.	The argument can be made that in this chemical reaction, the electromagnetic force is at work in a manner that influences - biases - the formation of these amino acid bonds. This influenced is described mathematically as stochastic dependence. The range of stochastic dependence spans from complete randomness to complete determinism.

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