David Kipping

Certainly from an evolutionary perspective, you do see growing complexity.

And there's a nice argument, I think it's by Gould, who shows that if you have a certain amount of complexity, it can either become less complex or more complex through random mutation.

And the less complex things are stripping away something, something that was necessary potentially to their survival.

And so in general, that's going to be not particularly useful in its survival.

And so it's going to be detrimental to strip away a significant amount of its useful traits.

Whereas if you add something, the most typical thing that you add is probably not useful at all.

It's probably just...

doesn't really affect its survival negatively, but neither does it provide any significant benefit.

But sometimes, on rare occasions, of course, it will be of benefit.

And so if you have a certain level of complexity, it's hard to go back in complexity, but it's fairly...

easy to go forward with enough bites of the cherry.

You will eventually build up in complexity, and that tends to be why we see complexity grow, certainly in an evolutionary sense, but also perhaps it's operating in chemical networks that led to the emergence of life.

I guess the real

The problem I have with the numbers game, just to come back to that, is that we are talking about a certain probability of that occurring.

It may be to go from the primordial soup, however you want to call it, the ingredients that the Earth started with, the organic molecules, the probability of going from that initial condition

to something that was capable of Darwinian natural selection that maybe we could define as life, the probability of that is maybe 1% of the time that happens.

In which case, you're right, the universe will be absolutely teeming with life.

But it could also be 10 to the power of minus 10, in which case it's 1 per galaxy, or 10 to the power of minus 100, in which case the vast majority of universes even do not have life within it.

Or 90%.

I admit that.