... II. The Framework ...

values paradoxes

Gibson summarizes how astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, who helped develop one of the cosmological models to explain the universe, and who he describes as an atheist, together with his colleague, Chandra Wickramasinghe, calculated the probability of one simple enzyme forming by chance. The enzyme was much simpler than even a bacterium. The two scientists determined that there was only one chance in 1020 of this simple enzyme appearing. Then, since they recognized that to form a single bacterium like E. colil would require 2,000 enzymes, each performing particular tasks, they needed to compute the compound probability of a single bacterium forming. The odds against the formation of a single bacterium were determined to be (1020)2000 to one, or 1040,000 to one. Remembering one definition of impossibility is defined as 1050 to one, it is seen that the calculated value represents an impossible situation. Gibson writes that Wickramasinghe later made the following analogy concerning their calculations; “The chances that life just occurred are about as unlikely as a typhoon blowing through a junk yard and constructing a Boeing 747.” 2.9

As a last example in this topic from this source, Gibson described how Gerald Schroeder used probability in his book The Science of God:

    “There are thirty-four phyla which define the structure of all animal life, and within those phyla there are approximately thirty million (30 x 106) species. A typical bacterial cell contains thousands of genes, and a typical mammalian cell contains tens of thousands. For our model let us select a representative cell as one which contains 60,000 (60 x 103) genes.

    If no proteins were common among species, then all life forms would be constructed of the number of different proteins as follows: (30 x 106) x (60 x 103 = 1,800 x 109 = 1.8 x 1012 There are 20 different amino acids, and a typical protein chain contains from 50 to 1,000 amino acid links. For our model let us use a protein with 300 amino acids in length.

    Consider first the twenty different kinds of amino acids. Biochemists often refer to each acid by a single letter abbreviation. G for glycine, S for serine, H for histidine, etc. In a protein chain of three hundred links the possible combinations are manifold. There might be a chain that contains links to ARSEHG… and another chaine IGRAAG… and so forth. With a total protein chain of 300 amino acids, and with twenty different kinds of acids the total possible combinations is given numerically as: 20300 x 10300=(2 x 1090) x 10300 = 2 x 10390 or approximately 10390.

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