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Short Primer on Probability

Now we will look at the “cumulative” idea and see if that is a go or not. For Evolution to be true there has to be a large amount of cumulative organization of positive mutations. In fact Evolution says that all life came out of prior non-life. Darwin’s warm pond or the lightning charged primordial soup of other evolutionists. Could that really happen? What do statistics say?

The amateur evolutionist above thinks that four and a half billion years seems to be enough, but is it?

We will give him not the 4.6 billion years for life but the whole supposed age of the universe of 20 billion. We will even assume that ALL of the 20 billion years are good and that all the precursors to life are in some warm primordial soup (we will discuss this in the Biochemistry section below) somewhere just waiting to do their thing.

Let’s talk briefly about probability which is a subset of Statistics. What is the chance if you toss a coin you get heads? Assuming the coin is equally weighted, and not a trick coin, it is 1/2. On a die the probability of rolling a six is 1/6. The probability of tossing a coin and getting heads and rolling a die and getting a six is 1/2 x 1/6 = 1/12. Now this doesn’t mean that in twelve tosses and throws you will get simultaneously a head and a six, it means that if you throw long enough 1/12 of all throws will have both a head and a six.

Now let us get a little more complicated. Let’s figure the odds or probability of randomly spelling the phrase “the theory of evolution”. There are 26 letters and one space possible adding to 27 possible selections. There are 20 letters in the phrase and 3 spaces. Therefore the odds, on the average, spell out the phrase correctly only once in 2723 outcomes! That is only one success in 8.3 quadrillion, quadrillion attempts or 8.3 x 1032. Now suppose ‘chance’ uses a machine which removes, records and replaces all the letters randomly at the fantastic speed of one billion per microsecond (one quadrillion per second). On the average the phrase would happen once in 25 billion years by this method.

Whoops! We ran out of time just trying to randomly recombine correctly a 23 letter and space phrase. You see the probability multiplication rule is not so kind to the randomness of evolution thought.

But let’s look at biological beginnings. You see in that warm pond or primal soup we just assume that there were amino acids there and we will assume that there were all the L type necessary for life. We will look later at Biochemistry and see it those assumptions are safe, but for now we will just assume them. One thing we will have to turn off is natural selection, because natural selection won’t work here. We are just trying to polymerize a self replicating organic structure like a DNA or RNA molecule, and natural selection assumes that a good allele will be safe and a bad allele won’t, and we don’t have any good or bad alleles yet. We are just trying to get the genes now in the right sequence. If they are not in the right sequence they won’t work and if they are, they will. And there is no way for evolution or natural selection or whatever other magic driver the evolutionists can come up with to know if the sequence is right until it replicates. There is no cumulative process here as a partially correct complex molecule won’t work and would be discarded until one does.

The odds of forming a chain of 124 specifically sequenced proteins of 400 amino acid bases is 1 x 1064,489! Now that is just one complex molecule and life requires much, much more. Mycoplasma genitalium has the smallest known genome of the free living organisms, containing 482 genes comprising 580,000 bases. A human DNA molecule can contain three billion amino acid bases. That is not counting all the other enzymes, proteins, hormones and other life chemistry needed. These odds are utterly impossible and shows that evolution being the source of life’s beginning is not even remotely possible.

Fred Hoyle stated this: “Two thousand different and very complex enzymes are required for a living organism to exist. And random shuffling processes could not form a single one of these even in 20 billion years. I don’t know how long it is going to be before astronomers generally recognize that the arrangement of not even one of the many thousand of biopolymers (Life molecules) on which life depends could have been arrived at by natural processes here on earth.

“Astronomers will have little difficulty in understanding this because they will be assured by biologists that it is not so; the biologists having been assured in their turn by others that it is not so. The ‘others’ are groups of persons who believe, quite openly, in mathematical miracles.

“They advocate the belief that, tucked away in nature outside of normal physics, there is a law which performs miracles (provided the miracles are in the aid of biology). The curious situation sits oddly on a profession that for long has been dedicated to coming up with logical explanations. . . The modern miracle workers are always found to be living in the twilight fringes of thermodynamics.”
Fred Hoyle, “The Big Bang in Astronomy,” in New Scientist, November 19, 1981, pp 521-527