Randomness

The best part of the movie Expelled, in my opinion, was near the end when Ben Stein asked Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionist from Oxford University, how life came about. Dawkins said that nobody knows. When Stein pressed him for details, the biologist said the first organism could have come from aliens.

Stein did us all a great service in that interview. It seems that among laypeople there is the feeling that scientists either know or are on the verge of knowing how life has formed. This interview exposed the truth. They don’t and aren’t. Why do people think they do? Scientists may give that impression themselves (to generalize).

Though Origin of Life and evolution are two different phenomena, they are somewhat related since they evaluate DNA, RNA, proteins and other cell activity. If Dawkins were to be truthful, he could have just as well said that nobody knows how evolution works. There are teachers and media involved in transporting information to the public. They come right out and say that evolution is a fact. How can it be a fact when we don’t even know where life came from? How can it be a fact when we have not evaluated fully all the implications of all the new microbiological information that is coming out from experiments?

I remember reading in one of Dawkins' books that the numbers of galaxies and star systems are in the billions and trillions, and that’s good enough for him to cover the probability that life started by chance. That sounds pretty scientific, right?

The study of probabilities is a discipline that is complicated and I am no expert. However, some aspects of probability are not too hard to understand, and the chance occurrence of life can first be considered under “independent probability.” This means that each molecule of amino acid or DNA could randomly connect to another. We can at least start here.

Professor of Theology and Science William Dembski, in his book, The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press, 1998), has shown that the limit of the number events in this universe are at 10^150. This is a very important limit to know, because we can compare it with the number of tries it would take to get life.

To start with a simple example, the probability of getting 3 heads with 8 sets-of-3 coin throws is 1 in 8 (see image).  This example can be classified under independent probability because one coin toss does not affect another. You’d have to do the 3 coin-flips at a time for 8 times to get a good chance of 3 heads. The probability of 1 in 8 comes from 2^3 (2 cubed or 2 the third power—see exponent link on right for more info). The base is 2 because of 2 possible outcomes for every throw (heads or tails) and the exponent is 3 because the set of 3 throws at a time gives a certain number of total possible outcome combinations (8). You still might not get the 3 heads in 8 tries or you may get them twice. But as the numbers of times you throw a set-of-3 go up, you are likely to fall pretty close to the probabilities that the possible options give you. If you have enough time, eventually you are pretty sure to get 3 heads in a 3-coin-toss. If you only get one set-of-3 toss, though, you have a 7 in 8 chance you won't get 3 heads.

However, to change the example, if you flip one coin one hundred times and want one hundred heads in a row, you will have 1 chance in 2^100, which is about 1 in 10^30. That number is a 1 with 30 zeroes after it. To compare that number to another, the number of seconds so far in the universe if it is 14 billion years old is about 4.4 x 10^17. If you could toss a coin every second for your whole life of 70 years, it would amount to about 2.2 x 10^9 (2.2 billion) tosses. Your chances are very small of getting 100 heads in a row even if you toss all your life. Beyond that, you can wish to get a trillion (10^12) heads in a row, but you simply don't have the time to even toss that number of coins, much less get a specific outcome.

In past posts I have put lists of the sub-unit codes for DNA and proteins. Douglas Axe, a researcher in protein function, put the proportion of specific to general functional proteins between 1 in 10^63 to 1 in 10^77 (link to article abstract HERE). To get total probabilities in independent probability, you multiply each probability. (With exponents, you add the exponents keeping the base the same: you can see more HERE.) The smallest number of proteins of a living bacteria found so far is ~1100, and bacteria are the simplest free-living organisms. When you take in account the types of bonds of the amino acids and the specific positions they need to have in order to function and the DNA which codes for them, you can compare that to the number of particles in the universe, which is estimated at about 10^90. The chances are much smaller for functional proteins in one living bacteria compared to all the particles in the universe.

I talked in the previous entry (June 3) about the true meaning of the word RANDOM. Lee Strobel, a journalist who wrote a great investigative book called The Case for a Creator, (Zondervan, 2004) about the prevailing attitudes in public perceptions of “modern science,” science education and what is really true. He interviewed Stephen Meyer concerning probabilities that life may have started by chance (p. 228-30). Meyer commented that origin-of-life experts have rejected the possibility of chance. In other words, they must look for a law of nature other than the ones we already know that would somehow cause life to form if they are to prove life came about by RANDOM nature alone.