Here we are...this is just a smattering of main points from a couple books. Book, author, and page numbers are noted.
From The Voice of the Earth, by Theodore Roszak
On Role of Chance in Evolution
“In the real study of nature, it makes no sense to hold that anything is in principle possible when in practice there is not enough time in the history of time itself for the process to work through all the permutations. The history of the universe is all the time there is; when we go beyond it, that is the point at which we confront zero probability.” (114)
“In the nineteenth century, Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the pioneers in the study of gases...took the position that chance alone accounted for the coherent structure of the universe. He even calculated the time required for chance to achieve that result. Enough time equals 10 [to the 10th to the 80th] years. A heroic calculation indeed: ten raised to a power expressed by another ten followed by eighty zeros. There would not be enough pages in all the books in all the libraries in the world to contain that large a figure.” 111
On the probability of life emerging out of the “primordial soup.”
“In the last 1970's Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe calculated the odds that life could have originated from just such an undirected sloshing about. Rather than trying to compute the probability for an entire organism springing into existence, they limited the problem to a sequence of twenty or thirty key amino acids in the enzymes of some hypothetical cell. The number they came up with was one chance in 10 to the 40,000. (116)
“when it comes to the spontaneous origin of life, Christian De Duve has worked out the combined probability of a series of hypothetical but necessary “biogenic steps” taking place in exactly the right order. The numbers that result “border on the miraculous: 10 [to -300] for as few as one thousand consecutive steps.” He concludes that “a multiple-step process that relies on one improbable event’s following another is sure to abort sooner or later.” (130-131)
“When it comes to the role of pure chance in the nature, scientists have shown as great a capacity as the pious to become true believers, granting accident and coincidence a creative power once reserved only to God.” (130)
and the other one...
John Gribbin and Martin Rees, Cosmic Coincidences: Dark Matter, Mankind, and The Anthropic Principle, New York, Bantam Books, 1989, pp. 15-18
The density parameter:
(Expresses the rate at which the universe must have expanded at the time of the Big Bang to achieve the present estimated density of matter.)
“John Gribbin has called this the “finest of finely tuned cosmic coincidences”’ he calculates that if the parameter had been different by the merest fraction (“a decimal point followed by sixty zeroes and a one”), galaxies could never have formed, and within them the stars that have generated every element besides hydrogen and helium.”
...
The density parameter is the whole mass of the universe thing I referred to earlier...it isn't quite so clear in the caption, even though it describes the idea well. I've read parts of both books, and they're both very good...highly reccommended for this sort of stuff.
-DM