Evolution Needs a Miracle — Without a Creator?
Inside
every living cell are proteins folded into precise three-dimensional
shapes that allow life to function. Even a “typical” protein is built
from a specific sequence of amino acids, chosen from 20 different types,
arranged in an exact order. The number of possible combinations is
astronomically large.
Laboratory studies show that only a
tiny fraction of random amino-acid sequences fold into stable,
functional proteins. Most sequences simply don’t work. This raises an
important scientific question: how did the first coordinated systems of
proteins arise before life could replicate, adapt, or evolve?
What
makes this challenge even more striking is that cells don’t rely on a
single protein. Even the simplest known cells require hundreds of
proteins working together at the same time—like parts in an integrated
machine. Without all the essential components present and functioning,
the system fails.
For comparison, physicists estimate
the observable universe contains about 10⁸⁰ atoms. When biological
probabilities are placed alongside physical limits, many researchers
argue that blind chance alone struggles to account for life’s origin.
This
doesn’t “disprove” evolution—but it does highlight a gap between what
random processes can easily explain and what we actually observe in
biology. The remarkable organization, information content, and
coordination found in life continue to raise thoughtful questions about
whether undirected processes are the whole story.
Curiosity, not dogma, is how science moves forward.
c/o The Intelligent Design
https://lnkd.in/eaAWs5Qb
5 comments:
You probably know this, but the theory of evolution does not claim or attempt to explain the origin of life. Evolution explains how life develops and changes over time, but that's a different issue than how life got started in the first place.
Last time I checked, there were actually fourteen hypotheses about how life could have originated. We will probably never know which of them is correct, since it happened so long ago and any traces of relevant evidence have long since been effaced, but it is certainly not considered an insoluble problem by modern scientists. Most of them involve a gradual development from extremely simple forms to the higher level of complexity that can be called true life, not the sudden appearance of complex protein-creating systems (the kind that characterize life today) out of nothing in a single step, which would indeed be implausible.
My own view is that the inherent improbability of even this slow multi-step origin of life can shed light on the Fermi paradox (why we see no sign of alien life elsewhere in the universe). Even in a universe of billions of galaxies each containing billions of planetary systems, an extremely low-probability event might well occur only once or twice in the whole universe. That is, life on Earth is a freak case, not because the Earth is unusual (though there are grounds for believing it is), but because it's here that that once-in-a-billion-billion-chances event happened to take place.
I don't see what Dave Dubya's comment has to do with the post topic.
Infidel, thanks for your thoughtful comment. I am indeed aware that evolution and the origin of life are not the same thing.
It has been said by Sir Fred Hoyle, the British Astronomer, that the spontaneous emergence of a single cell organism from random couplings of chemicals is about as likely as the assemblage of a Boeing 747 by a tornado whirling through a junkyard.
How much more complex is a fern, or a dog, or human than such a single cell organism?
When the statistical probability of the vast array of life on this planet occurring through random chance in order to form intelligent life is so minuscule as to approach impossibility, it certainly strikes me to assume that some sort of transcendent intelligence had to have been involved in the design. For life to have spontaneously occurred by random chance would be the equivalent of winning the lottery a googol plex number of times. When something approaches that level of improbability as to be statistically impossible, I am going to assume another explanation for it having occurred, sir.
As for our friend Dave, he routinely blasts my blog with non-sequitur and often-times factually-challenged comments. I must have accidentally approved instead of having deleted that comment. Typically the comments aren't worth the time to even read as most of it is the same old charges of racism, fascism, white nationalist nonsense that he typically spouts. Trump will be out of office for a decade, and our friend Dave will still be making anti-Trump Nazi posts in 2039.
My point is, though, that nobody is claiming that complex life forms arose via random chance. Evolution isn't a random process. Mutation is random, natural selection is not. Once a planet has even very simple self-replicating life forms (something like prokaryotic cells, far simpler than the eukaryotic cells that mike up animals and plants), the development of more complex forms is easily explained by the well-understood mechanisms of mutation and natural selection. The process is absolutely not random, and it does not require any kind of guiding intelligence. Three and a half billion years is more than enough time to get from simple replicators to organisms as complex as humans. Based on cases where natural selection has been observed in detail and we can see how fast it changes living things, it could easily have taken far less time than it did.
As to the original formation of those simple self-replicators (the "origin of life"), as I said, we don't know how it happened and probably never will, but there are several hypotheses -- we just have no surviving evidence to tell us which one of them is what actually did happen. Actual scientists familiar with the relevant chemistry certainly don't regard it as so improbable that it couldn't have happened naturally. For example, we've known for decades that amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) do form spontaneously in simulations of the chemical environment of pre-life Earth; amino acids have even been found in meteorites, showing that they form spontaneously even in far less favorable conditions. So there's no need to speculate about the probability of amino acids forming from simpler molecules -- we know it happens quite easily. And as I said, the progression to the more complex protein-synthesizing systems necessary for life probably happened by a series of small steps, not one single 747-out-of-a-junkyard leap which would indeed be highly improbable. There are several proposed ways this could have happened based on known chemistry. We just don't know which one of them actually did happen. Intuitively it seems prohibitively unlikely -- but in fact it isn't.
It's certainly an easy enough process to have happened once, or a few times, in a universe of quadrillions upon quadrillions of planets. Most scientists with a detailed knowledge of the relevant chemistry consider it easy enough to have happened much more often than that, and expect that at least simple life is fairly common in the universe.
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