16 Mar '05 18:57>
The Improbability of Probability
To understand probability, let us look at a few examples. The probability of a flipped coin coming up heads is 1 chance out of 2. What is the chance of three coins coming up heads? It is one out of 2 X 2 X 2 or eight. As we increase the number of coins flipped, the probability of getting all heads decreases rapidly. With ten coins, the probability is 1 in 1024. With 20 coins, it is 1 in 1,048,576.
The Left Handed Amino Acid Dilemma
Let us now apply the principles of probability to the problem of origin of life. Proteins are an important family of molecules that make up life. They are gigantic in comparison to ordinary chemicals found outside life. Typically, a protein is 400 to 1000 times larger and more complex than the molecules that make up gasoline. A protein is a polymer, which is a chain of components all linked together. We call these links in the chain amino acids.
If you chemically build amino acids in a test tube, they will form into equal amounts of "right handed" and "left handed" isomers. This concerns the three dimensional shape of the molecules. Chemically, the right handed and left handed forms react the same, and are indistinguishable apart from their three dimensional orientation. The two forms are mirror images of each other.
There are twenty different amino acids used as building blocks in proteins. The sequence of the amino acids and the three dimensional shape determine the function of the protein. Therefore, let us look at what it would take to create a functional protein or enzyme.
A typical protein is made up of a chain of 445 left-handed amino acids. No protein found in nature contains right handed amino acids. Though origin of life experiments produce equal mixtures of both, all proteins use only the left-handed variety. Therefore, in order for the original protein to be formed, all amino acids used out of the original mixture needed to be left-handed.
We can now apply the laws of probability to this. The chances of an average protein consisting of 445 amino acids forming by chance are one chance out of 2410 or 10123 (35 of the amino acids would be glycine, which is symmetrical).
To illustrate the magnitude of this impossibility, let's have a contest. Suppose we give a snail moving at the speed of one inch every million years the task of moving the entire earth atom by atom over to the other side of the universe and back.
Then, imagine the length of time it takes light to travel one millimeter, and a million proteins forming in that length of time hoping to form one protein with all left-handed amino acids. Guess what! The snail would win, many millions of times over before even one left-handed protein would be formed!
Presume now that we can make amino acids ambidextrous for the moment and ignore this problem for the evolutionists' sake. We now have a problem making sure that the amino acids are in the right order to give the protein its function. Each amino acid has a characteristic that forms weak bonds, giving the protein its three dimensional shape. It is this shape that gives the protein its activity in living systems.
If we disturb a protein with an outside force such as heat, acid, or any other abnormal environment, the three-dimensional shape of the protein will be upset, and it will lose its activity. When this happens, we say the protein is denatured. Therefore, a protein may have all its amino acids left-handed and in proper sequence and still be useless because the three dimensional shape is not correct.
There are twenty amino acids that make up the basic building blocks of the protein. The order is very important, like the code of a computer program, or a sentence in a book. If just one amino acid is out of sequence, it changes the entire structure of the protein, just like changing a word in a sentence.
This is the effect of a mutation. It weakens the protein's function, usually to the point where it no longer does its job. The origin of disease is simple, it is a departure from the perfect creation of God caused by mutations. Mutations are a degenerative process and not the driving force evolutionists seek to explain the origin of life.
Let us assume in spite of the incredible odds that we now have a protein meeting every requirement, with left-handed amino acids, proper amino acid sequence and three dimensional structure. The next problem to face is configuring the least number of proteins, needed with DNA and associated molecules to form a living cell.
Scientists estimate that 238 proteins would be the absolute minimum number that would be needed to form life. Is it possible to bring together that many proteins and interrelate them in such a way to continuously process food and energy? A problem in doing this is even if we concentrated the right proteins together in the same place at once, they still would have to be configured in the proper structure in order for life to exist.
Coppedge, in his book, Evolution: Possible or Impossible, makes several probability calculations concerning life coming about by chance. Giving evolution all kinds of concessions, he comes up with the probability for the first cell to evolve by accident as one chance in 1029345. It would take an 80-page book just to print that number. In comparison, the number of inches across the known universe is 1028. Statistically, scientists consider 1 chance in 1050 to be impossible. From these figures, you can be certain that the evolution of the cell is impossible!
Some have thought that viruses are precursors to living cells, but to reproduce, viruses need living cells as hosts! So even if a virus happened to appear by chance, it would have been the last unless there was a cell nearby whose reproductive mechanism it could exploit.
http://www.rae.org/revev6.html
To understand probability, let us look at a few examples. The probability of a flipped coin coming up heads is 1 chance out of 2. What is the chance of three coins coming up heads? It is one out of 2 X 2 X 2 or eight. As we increase the number of coins flipped, the probability of getting all heads decreases rapidly. With ten coins, the probability is 1 in 1024. With 20 coins, it is 1 in 1,048,576.
The Left Handed Amino Acid Dilemma
Let us now apply the principles of probability to the problem of origin of life. Proteins are an important family of molecules that make up life. They are gigantic in comparison to ordinary chemicals found outside life. Typically, a protein is 400 to 1000 times larger and more complex than the molecules that make up gasoline. A protein is a polymer, which is a chain of components all linked together. We call these links in the chain amino acids.
If you chemically build amino acids in a test tube, they will form into equal amounts of "right handed" and "left handed" isomers. This concerns the three dimensional shape of the molecules. Chemically, the right handed and left handed forms react the same, and are indistinguishable apart from their three dimensional orientation. The two forms are mirror images of each other.
There are twenty different amino acids used as building blocks in proteins. The sequence of the amino acids and the three dimensional shape determine the function of the protein. Therefore, let us look at what it would take to create a functional protein or enzyme.
A typical protein is made up of a chain of 445 left-handed amino acids. No protein found in nature contains right handed amino acids. Though origin of life experiments produce equal mixtures of both, all proteins use only the left-handed variety. Therefore, in order for the original protein to be formed, all amino acids used out of the original mixture needed to be left-handed.
We can now apply the laws of probability to this. The chances of an average protein consisting of 445 amino acids forming by chance are one chance out of 2410 or 10123 (35 of the amino acids would be glycine, which is symmetrical).
To illustrate the magnitude of this impossibility, let's have a contest. Suppose we give a snail moving at the speed of one inch every million years the task of moving the entire earth atom by atom over to the other side of the universe and back.
Then, imagine the length of time it takes light to travel one millimeter, and a million proteins forming in that length of time hoping to form one protein with all left-handed amino acids. Guess what! The snail would win, many millions of times over before even one left-handed protein would be formed!
Presume now that we can make amino acids ambidextrous for the moment and ignore this problem for the evolutionists' sake. We now have a problem making sure that the amino acids are in the right order to give the protein its function. Each amino acid has a characteristic that forms weak bonds, giving the protein its three dimensional shape. It is this shape that gives the protein its activity in living systems.
If we disturb a protein with an outside force such as heat, acid, or any other abnormal environment, the three-dimensional shape of the protein will be upset, and it will lose its activity. When this happens, we say the protein is denatured. Therefore, a protein may have all its amino acids left-handed and in proper sequence and still be useless because the three dimensional shape is not correct.
There are twenty amino acids that make up the basic building blocks of the protein. The order is very important, like the code of a computer program, or a sentence in a book. If just one amino acid is out of sequence, it changes the entire structure of the protein, just like changing a word in a sentence.
This is the effect of a mutation. It weakens the protein's function, usually to the point where it no longer does its job. The origin of disease is simple, it is a departure from the perfect creation of God caused by mutations. Mutations are a degenerative process and not the driving force evolutionists seek to explain the origin of life.
Let us assume in spite of the incredible odds that we now have a protein meeting every requirement, with left-handed amino acids, proper amino acid sequence and three dimensional structure. The next problem to face is configuring the least number of proteins, needed with DNA and associated molecules to form a living cell.
Scientists estimate that 238 proteins would be the absolute minimum number that would be needed to form life. Is it possible to bring together that many proteins and interrelate them in such a way to continuously process food and energy? A problem in doing this is even if we concentrated the right proteins together in the same place at once, they still would have to be configured in the proper structure in order for life to exist.
Coppedge, in his book, Evolution: Possible or Impossible, makes several probability calculations concerning life coming about by chance. Giving evolution all kinds of concessions, he comes up with the probability for the first cell to evolve by accident as one chance in 1029345. It would take an 80-page book just to print that number. In comparison, the number of inches across the known universe is 1028. Statistically, scientists consider 1 chance in 1050 to be impossible. From these figures, you can be certain that the evolution of the cell is impossible!
Some have thought that viruses are precursors to living cells, but to reproduce, viruses need living cells as hosts! So even if a virus happened to appear by chance, it would have been the last unless there was a cell nearby whose reproductive mechanism it could exploit.
http://www.rae.org/revev6.html