RELATIVE HUMAN EFFICIENCY
There is a force all around us, common but mysterious. It is unlike anything else in nature. Its source is greatly disputed. Some claim a supernatural origin. Some theorize that it has emerged through a biological process. Some deny that it exists at all and claim that it is merely an illusion. Very few of us seem to understand how different this force is from gravity or the other actions of nature. It can accomplish things that nothing else can.
The force is human effort. It can easily be shown that it is millions of times more effective than unguided natural forces at achieving complex results. I call this Relative Human Efficiency (RHE). In a sentence, this principle states, “Small-scale events that occur by chance can be reproduced easily by human effort.” Conversely, humans can easily produce items that are useful and complex that could never result from undirected natural forces. The implications are quite significant.
DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE
Let’s look at what human efficiency can do and what chance struggles to do.
The above photograph shows 36 coins arranged in a circle. With reasonable assumptions for position and orientation, the probability
of a circle resulting from dropping the coins onto a flat surface figures to be 1 in 1035. This is an extremely low probability. A closer look at the photo will reveal additional characteristics that render the arrangement even more improbable. All of the coins are “heads” and oriented so that the top of the head is toward the top of the photo. There’s even more. No two coins have the same date. They are arranged in ascending date order in the counterclockwise direction, with the latest- and earliest-dated coins meeting at the
bottom of the circle. The chance of achieving this precise arrangement with a random throw is on the order of 1 in 10116, or 1 followed by 116 zeros. This is far beyond the realm of possibility in any reasonable sense.
Here’s something really interesting about this “impossible” array. It can be easily reproduced by a person of normal ability in about twenty minutes. The implication is significant. Events that are sufficiently complex that they could never occur by chance are relatively easy to achieve through human effort!
Some minor qualifications are necessary. The chance of a giant meteor hitting the earth on any given day is estimated at roughly 1 in 1040. This is about the same as the chance of throwing 26 consecutive pairs of ones at dice. Most fourth graders could set (not throw) a pair of dice with the ones up 26 times in a row. However, it is clear that human effort is not sufficient to cause a giant meteor to strike the earth. Is my premise therefore false? Not at all, but it must be qualified. Let’s state it this way: If the requirements of an event with regard to space, time, matter and energy are within human capabilities, and if that event occurs by chance, then it can be reproduced easily by human effort. This is the definition of the principle of Relative Human Efficiency.
MONKEYS AND LIFE
This principle squares with observations on either side of the equation. Anything that is known to occur by chance can easily be duplicated by human effort (within the above-mentioned limitations of space, time, and so on). Anything that is even moderately difficult for intelligence never does and never could happen by chance. One additional example will show how dramatic this relationship is. Remember the old question about how long it would take some number of monkeys to type the works of Shakespeare? If we assume equal probability for all characters, including upper and lower case and punctuation but excluding
numbers, we calculate the chance of getting just the first three lines of the Hamlet at less than 1 in 10300. If we had a trillion monkeys and they all typed a thousand words a second (fast monkeys!), it would still take an average of twenty trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years to accomplish the task. On the other hand, most typists could easily finish in a couple minutes.
Now, let’s apply this premise to the question, “Could life begin by chance?” According to the standard contemporary scenario, life arose in some primordial soup when energy (lightning?) interacted with a group of chemicals. The first life is supposed to have been a simple, one-celled organism that became the ancestor of all living things. The requirements of space, time, matter and energy to reproduce this origin of life scenario are certainly within human capabilities. A one-celled organism is very small, so the formation of such a cell would necessarily be a small-scale, localized event. Energy requirements would be modest because large amounts of energy would destroy the compounds that are required for life. There is no reason to suppose that a person would have difficulty reproducing any plausible conditions that could result in the origin of life.
Applying our premise brings us to an interesting conclusion. Any imaginable scenario for the origin of life involves resources that are well within human capabilities. Therefore, if life could arise by chance, it would be easy to create by human effort. Put in more common terms, if there were the slightest possibility of life having arisen by chance, then high schoolers would be making living organisms in their basement labs. Instead of wondering whether mankind will ever create life, we would be fascinated and amazed by the variety of life forms that our scientists are creating. And, we would also be gravely concerned about the possibility of laboratories either accidentally or intentionally producing microbes more malicious than ebola or zika.
We have shown that human effort is tremendously more efficient than chance in producing complex events. Since the creation of life has eluded human efforts, it follows that it most certainly did not arise from chance. Therefore, we must look for a Creative Force that is even more efficient than intelligent human effort to explain the existence of living things.
HUMAN EFFICIENCY IN OBSERVATIONS
Human ingenuity (intelligence) is extremely efficient at measurements and observations of all sorts. We can identify the very fast:for example, the half-life of carbon 21 has been determined to be 30 billionths of a second! A bullet from a high-powered rifle would travel less than the thickness of a piece of paper in that length of time. We detect the very small with photomultiplier tubes that can detect a single photon of light. We also analyze the very large and very slow, such as the mass of the moon (7.432×1022 kg) and the rate of slowing of the rotation of the earth (.17 second per century).
Researchers have been looking for real evolution in action for over 150 years, but nothing has been found. By “real” evolution we mean a useful increase in order and complexity in living organisms. It would be the kind of change that produces eyes in sightless creatures and develops feathers and wings on fish. Whatever this evolutionary mechanism might be, it necessarily would have had to have happened billions of times to produce the current variety of life from a common ancestor. Evolutionary theory claims that very small changes accumulated over millions of years, but it also requires these changes to be very common.
If we were looking for life’s origination or evolution with a cheap magnifying glass, it would be plausible that it has escaped our recognition. But we have used a capability that ranges from the electron microscope to the Hubble Telescope. How could such an efficient observational capability directed toward very common events result in anything but multiple detailed descriptions of the occurrences? In other words, if evolution were happening, why isn’t it seen? The answer seems obvious.
CONCLUSION
From Benjamin Franklin’s kite to the splitting of the atom, human efficiency has identified, analyzed and utilized a vast array of natural processes. On a human scale, anything that can happen can be duplicated; anything that occurs can be seen or detected. The principle of Relative Human Efficiency provides significant ways to evaluate theories of the origin and development of life. Behind the scenes, this principle has been at work in all scientific and technological advancements. If generally understood, it will add a new, broader perspective to our world and all that is in it.