Well the question is just how physics plays into this. Proteins are not random because we have laws of physics that govern their structure and even if they were then once you have a protein which is self replicating and it’s better at doing that job in its environment that’s all you need, “natural selection” does not need life it just needs a process that is iterative, repeatable and is dependent on its environment.

Overall life might be an inevitable outcome of our universe as our universe is predisposed to create carbon and life is the most efficient process of hydrating carbon we currently know off if increasing entropy is a natural lawful state of the universe it will be predisposed for creating life to serve that purpose.

That said it’s unclesr if complex and not to mention intelligent life is a predisposition or an anomaly as out of the nearly 4 billion years life existing on Earth and now it seems it started only a few 100Ms of years after the early bombardment period technological intelligence evolved so late into the game that it might have been a fluke.

Other types of intelligence exist we have pretty darn smart animals but despite many of them predating mankind and our ancestors none of them has ever evolved further.

I didn't say anything about proteins being random. But words of hundreds of letters, out of 23 possible letters, come in many, many, many combinations. All governed by laws of physics. Not to mention the many ways a protein could fold, not all ways being useful, but are still possible. The search space, as I said, is huge.

The length of the words doesn't matter much if you have an effective process to filter and make sense of them and those processes are completely natural.

For example if we take self replicating proteins these will self optimize to an exact letter order which would improve their ability to self replicate in the environment and this isn't conscious since the random assortment that would be better would simply over take the other types in a fairly short amount of time.

Beyond that you still have some random process of "mutation" and that is proteins that were not replicated correctly which can happen for multitude of reasons something bumped into them, temperature changed, acidity changed, random high energy cosmic ray hit them and boom one is not like the other.

If that new protein is now better at replicating in that environment whether it's because this new protein can replicate faster or is more resilient to it's environment and it degrades slower it will take over it's environment and the same holds true for the opposite as if that protein replicates slower it will eventually die out because it cannot compete faster proteins for the available raw materials and so it replicates slower until eventually it's gone.

This is the true beauty of natural selection it works on all processes even those we don't consider biological.

Life is not 'self replicating proteins', but rather self-replicating processes. And in those processes, hundreds of chemical components are involved in a dynamical manner, which requires both spacial (chemical formula) and time synchronization.

And as life complexity increases, so does the the complexity of the processes that make it possible. Humans are the result of a huge number of individual, albeit not all independent, events, each with a very low probability. Multiplying those probabilities, as it's required when determining the probability of occurrence of a sequence of independent events, yields numbers that are hard to event write down without special notations.

As I see it, the only way out is to postulate evolution based on other non-probabilistic evidence, and then to conclude that in spite of the low probability those events still happened.

You should not be asking "how likely it is that natural processes could have created life that invented mcdonalds and justin bieber" but "how likely it is that natural processes could have created _some kind_ of intelligent life".

Specific details of a given example (us, the one example we know about) are irrelevant.

In other words: take a coin, throw it 1000 times and record the results. Now calculate the probability of the exact outcome you just got. Pretty low, yet you just did it. Now ask another question -- how likely is that at least 200 of those results are heads? Pretty high.

How unlikely life is is a question of just how big the set of results qualifying as _life_ is. We are (probably) just one possible configuration.

The search space is huge if only some one intelligent is sitting there and trying it out one take at a time.

In reality its chemical reactions. And there are only a few ways in which they happen.

The possible search space and possible combination can be huge even with chemistry however the number of combination that would be the most effective in a given task and environment is fairly limited and natural selection makes this search very easy because anything that isn't suitable for that environment and the task of surviving even if it's a simple protein would die out.

>>The possible search space and possible combination can be huge even with chemistry

Again search/combination space argument suggests there is a process that resets to 0 and moves to the last possible state incrementally, and that process repeats endlessly until a desirable state is reached, avoiding previously reached final states.

The problem with the above argument is words like 'reset', 'desirable state'.

In reality there is no 'search space'. Its really uni directional chemical reactions that go on, each one happening now was due to the reactions before. These reactions go on until you reach a set of chemicals that either just don't react with each other, or the chemical reactions just continue seemingly forever.

Out come of some these reactions could be life.

The 'desirable state' always exists and that is govern by the laws of physics and the environment.

In this case if we have self replicating proteins in a puddle of amino acids then those which would replicate the best in that environment and that process would be governed by multiple factors such as what is the most "cost effective" combination and what is the most "resilient" combination that will hold up to environmental factors.

For the amino acids themselves it's not that different which ones would appear and at what ratio would also be governed by the laws of physics based on the compounds available, the make up of the solvent existing energy sources and more.

If for example you have amino acids that can survive dehydration and those who cannot then the only ones which will be left after a few cycles of that puddle drying up and filling with water will be those which can survive. Same will go for the proteins the protein which will be able to survive dehydration the best and or the proteins that would assemble and self replicate the fastest during the wet period would be the ones that are the "desirable state" as these would be the ones that survive this specific environment and process.

No process is ever this random. Its not like the infinite money theorem.

    Infinite monkey take 1, Atlas Srugged written? yes : no
    Infinite monkey take 2, Atlas Srugged written? yes : no
    ...
    Infinite monkey take n, Atlas Srugged written? yes : no

In reality its more like what happens before effects what comes later. This is different in the case of Boeing because there is a degree of non-reactive stuff coming together there. In case of Amino acids and subsequent formation of life its just chemistry, and that gets progressively complicated.

And this process is happening between the most commonly naturally occurring elements. So these triggers and process would have happened in almost every star system.

I can't cite you a study, but every time I've read about life appearance, the authors believed that the primitive forms were much simpler. Once the current more effective forms evolved, the original ones disappeared or got assimilated.

The Earth is 4.5B years old. Evidence of life appears 260M-1B years later, with the earliest date given by the current earliest equivocal findings and the latest by direct fossil evidence.

A naive 1-in-23e100 calculation is probably the wrong way to go about it. After all, the probability of any poker hand is 1-in-2.6M.