Theoretical Probabilities and the Evolution of Life

thermodynamics is the science of what happens when the fast things have already happened but the slow things haven't yet happened so in the very long run it is far more likely that the cup of tea will liquefy and spread all over the table. When you're trying to calculate what is likely you've got to take real-world things like what's a likely time scale for the process you're measuring. The kind of thing you can easily get wrong is that the real-life probabilities are always about this medium term thing they're never about the long term.