Evolution and Randomness Cont…

December 21, 2011 by The Alternate Economy

For those of you who feel that I used unfair numbers by trying to determine if a Human could have formed randomly, I will now look at the numbers for a single DNA nucleotide to form by random combination.

Using the numbers from the first part of this post, let us look at the chance of a DNA nucleotide forming in our Universe during the last 12 billion years. A single DNA nucleotide has only 30 atoms on average, but can still be composed of 118 different types of atoms. The number of combinations of 118 atoms into molecules of 30 atoms in length is approximately 1.43 x 10⁶²

The chance of a DNA nucleotide forming randomly is about 1 in 3.86 x 10³⁵ . Considering that there are somewhere in the region of 3.99 x 10⁷⁷ atoms in our Universe it is safe to say that this would have happened quite a few times by now in our universe.

But a human genome is the combination of 2.9 billion nucleotide pairs. There are only 4 types of nucleotides, but the number of combinations that could be put together to create a human is still 8.33 x 10^{3,490,000,000} . Although it seems quite possible that DNA could have formed naturally. Once we start asking about humanity arriving from random combinations of genes we see that this is again an impossibility. Our Universe would need to be billions of billions of years old for humans to have succesfully found the right combination of nucleotides to create our current life. Especially considering that lifeforms do not recombine a billion times a second like atoms do. Evolution implies that each combination is separated by a generation. For humans a generation is around 18 to 25 years. For us to have found the right combination of nucleotides out of a choice of 8330000000000000000… (plus 3 billion more zeros) possible combinations would have taken billions of generations. Not billions of years.

Even when we look at DNA more simply we see that a living being as complex as humanity could never have arisen in 12 billion years from random combinations. There must have been some consciousness involved at every stage of evolution for it to have arrived at this point so quickly.

I would love it if you would prove me wrong. I’m sure many people disagree with my numbers. I am curious to hear yours.