GREAT MYTHS OF EVOLUTION #8

by David N. Menton

GIVEN ENOUGH TIME ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE - EVEN EVOLUTION

This myth is the ultimate argument of those who attempt to "explain"

the origin of the Cosmos and all life by CHANCE and the natural

properties of matter and energy. Evolutionists hope that by invoking

immense amounts of time, highly improbable events can somehow be made

probable.

But with this type of argument it is possible to "explain"

ANYTHING. We've all heard it said, for example, that "given enough

monkeys and enough typewriters, EVENTUALLY one of them is bound to type

the sonnets of Shakespeare error free." But this outrageous myth

violates the statistical foundation on which all modern science rests.

 

Statistically controlled experiments are useless if we do not assume

that highly improbable events simply do not occur. The probability of

any event which has a known number of possible outcomes can be cal-

culated quite easily.

The probability of rolling a particular number

on a die, for example, is one chance out of six (the total number of

possible sides) or 1/6. The probability of getting TWO particular

numbers on two successive rolls of the die is 1/6 x 1/6 or 1/36, which

is to say you would expect to succeed once in 36 rolls. What then is

the probability of randomly selecting the appropriate letters and

spaces from a Scrabble set to spell "THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION"?

There

are 26 different letters and a space in the alphabet (total 27) and

there is a total of 23 of these letters and spaces in our sentence. The

probability of spelling this sentence without error by blindly drawing

and replacing letters from our 27 character set is calculated by mult-

iplying 1/27 x 1/27 x 1/27 .... 23 times. The answer reveals that we

would expect to spell this simple sentence correctly by CHANCE

approximately ONCE IN 8 HUNDRED MILLION, TRILLION, TRILLION draws!!

If

we drew and replaced letters at the rate of a billion a second we would

expect to succeed once in 26 THOUSAND, TRILLION YEARS!!

Now the

simplest living organism is so vastly more complex than our simple

sentence, that we have no way of really calculating its probability.

If, however, we consider just one one particular protein of average

size (say 500 amino acids) from among the thousands of proteins in a

living organism, we can easily calculate the probability of forming it

by CHANCE. Proteins are made of a tightly linked chain of amino acids.

There are only 20 different amino acids used in the proteins of ALL

living organisms and they are arranged in a linear sequence much like

the letters of a long paragraph. Assuming an inexhaustible supply of

each of the 20 different amino acids, the probability calculation would

be 1/20 x 1/20 x 1/20 ... 500 times. The number of possible

combinations of the amino acids in this protein is 1 with over 600

zeros after it!

Even if we were to begin with the proper mixture of 500

amino acids to make our particular protein, we could never get the

correct sequence for them by CHANCE. Even if the entire universe were

packed tight with computers the size of electrons, each trying a

billion combinations of our 500 amino acids a second, we could sample

only an infinitesimally small fraction of all of the possible combi-

nations in 300 billion years!

Even if every medium sized protein

molecule that ever existed on earth were ALL DIFFERENT, our vast

"fleet" of busy computers could not be expected to come up with the

combination of amino acids in ANY ONE OF THEM in a mere 300 billion

years!!

What all this means is that if the whole of evolution were re-

duced to the question of the probability of forming ANY ONE

biologically useful protein of average size, we could safely conclude

that evolution would be a VIRTUAL IMPOSSIBILITY by reason of the fact

that there would be INSUFFICIENT TIME AND MATTER IN THE UNIVERSE!!! Now

calculate how much faith it takes to believe in evolution.