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From: rjb@akgua.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: If You've Got the Time...
Message-ID: <895@akgua.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 19-Jul-84 09:15:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: akgua.895
Posted: Thu Jul 19 09:15:45 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 21-Jul-84 03:20:34 EDT
Distribution: net.religion
Organization: AT&T Technologies/Bell Labs, Atlanta
Lines: 56


If the Rationalist Materialist explanation of the origins
of life on Earth are correct then we sprang from the chance
combination of elements into amino acids and the chance
union of amino acids into proteins.  The argumentation that is
usually advanced is that over the long eons of time the various
combinations were "tried" by nature until the right ones matched
up.  The question on the floor today is "Was there enough time
for this process to take place and thus validate the explanation ?"

I submit that the answer is no.

Estimates for the age of the Universe seem to vary from 10 to 20
billion years with the Earth usually coming in at around 4-5 billion
years old.

Isaac Asimov has estimated that there are about 8 E+27 different
possible combinations of an insulin-like protein. [1]  Let's use
insulin as our "test case".  Now if we are arbitrarily generous
and estimate that the Earth's age is 10 Billion years old instead
of 5 Billion and we assume that for each SECOND that the Earth has
existed a different combination of insulin-like protein is produced,
then after 10 E+09 years worth of seconds we would have tried
about 3 E+17 combinations.

We could expect, on the average, to hit the winning combination
at about 4 E+27 combinations (about half).  As you can see, we are
still about 10 orders of magnitude away from our probable "hit"
and our time is up.

When you move up to a more complex chemical entity like hemoglobin
(135 E+165 combinations) [2] the time situation becomes even more
astronomically improbable. 

Note that my source on this combination data (Asimov) is not a
creationist or religious person.

What do say ?         

****************************

[1] Isaac Asimov, The Genetic Code, New York : The New American Library,
1962, p92.

[2] Ibid.

****************************




Bob Brown {...ihnp4!akgua!rjb}
AT&T Technologies, Inc.............. Norcross, Ga
(404) 447-3784 ...  Cornet 583-3784