Revisiting
I have some good friends. I got some feedback on the last post and I wanted to take some time and revisit.
Dan, you don’t need to create a human, you just have to account for the mutation rate.
Ok yeah the “first” organism wasn’t a human according to what I was taught in school. I was taught that the “first” organism was some kind of prokaryote. Just for fun I went and searched out what the claims are about that organism and found some interesting data.
Prokaryotes
Prokaryotes are thought to be the first organisms that existed on earth. To be clear, when we talk about “organisms” we are talking about something that
- is born
- eats
- expels waste
- can reproduce
- dies
Wikipedia (which I would argue is as good a source as any on topics that require such unabashed speculation) seems to suggest that one of the oldest organisms to have lived on the earth is called the Archaea1. Some quick googling about Archaea says that its genome is anywhere from 0.5 Mbp (Mega base-pairs) to as much as 5 Mpb2
A “Mega base-pair” is 1 million base-pairs
So we are talking about somewhere between 500,000 base-pairs and 5 million base-pairs. So from our last post, we learned that trying to assemble the As Cs Ts and Gs in the right order to build a functioning organism that can check all the boxes is something like 4number of base-pairs. So, in this example, on the conservative side, we’d be talking about 4500k. This is still an unfathomably huge number. When I plug it into WolframAlpha, I get ~9.990 x 1030102.
This isn’t entirely accurate, because we could, conceivably arrange the base-pairs to create something that could still check the boxes, but would be a different organism. Something like having arranged the DNA you got from your mom and you dad would have yielded your brother instead of you.
We might have missed the point
I don’t know how many ways there are to get a viable organism that checks the boxes out of the given sequence, but what I can tell you is that there are far more ways to get chaos from it than order. To illustrate this, all you have to do is think of a box of scrabble tiles. You can shake that box for a month of Sundays and they will never appear in alphabetic order or in an order that would spell anything beyond a word a few letters long.
All this is true, but it also entirely misses the point. That number is impossibly and unfathomably large. Just for fun, I ran back to WolframAlpha and did a binary search to figure out exactly how small the genome would have to be to reduce the probability down to our astronaut metaphor. Remember? If you drop an astronaut in the middle of the galaxy and tell him to find one marked proton among the 1080 particles? To get our genome probability down to 1080 we actually have to reduce the genome down to 135 base-pairs. That’s right. 135. No organism can have a genome this small. Even a bacteria’s chromosomes contain at least 500,000 base-pairs3. So, any errata that we found in my last post are already factored out by reducing our search space to the number of particles in the observable universe.
The point is that it’s just indescribably improbable to created specified order with just time and entropy. Especially since there aren’t enough probabalistic resources to do what we intend. Keep in mind, the model I’m criticizing says the earth is around 4.6 billion years old. Guess how many seconds that is? 1027 seconds. So our poor astronaut wouldn’t even be able to check one proton per second.
Questioning your assumptions can be helpful. I encourage you to do it and, if you haven’t already, begin to think for yourself instead of just accepting what people tell you.
Lastly, it was pointed out that it would be helpful to provide some links to the books I cited. Here they are (yes, they are affiliate links, and they’re short links because I like to know how many people click on them):
Darwin’s Doubt, Stephen Meyer
Darwin Devolves, Michael Behe