“Nature is skewed toward life.”

Gerald L. Schroeder earned B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in nuclear physics and in earth and planetary sciences.  An American and an Orthodox Jew, he now lives in Jerusalem.  Here are a couple of passages from pages 44-45 of his book God According to God: A Scientist Discovers We’ve Been Wrong About God All Along (New York: HarperOne, 2009):

Strings of proteins vary in length from a few hundred to a few thousand amino acids.  Consider a relatively short protein, such as one 200 amino acids long.  into each of the 200 spaces along the protein any one of the 20 amino acids found in life can fall.  That means the total number of possible combinations is 20 times 20 times 20 repeated 200 times.  The result is 20 to the power of 200, or ten to the power of 260 (10²⁶⁰), a one with 260 zeros after it, or a billion billion billion repeated 29 times.  From this vast biological grab bag of options, we are told that nature, by random chance mutations, has been able to form the few hundred thousand proteins useful to earthly life and upon which nature could exert its selective pressures.

Let us assume that the entire hydrosphere, all of the approximately 1.4 x 10²¹ liters of water in all the oceans and icebergs and lakes on earth, was imbibed in biological cells each weighing a billionth of a gram.  We would have had 10³³ cells reproducing, mutating, actively moving this grand process of evolution.  If each cell divided each and every second since the appearance of liquid water on earth some four billion years ago, the total number of mutations, or stated another way, the number of evolutionary trials, would be 10⁵⁰.  Although vast, this number pales when compared with the 10²⁶⁰ potential failing options for a single protein.  Hitting upon the useful combinations did not, and could not, and will not happen by chance. . . .

Clearly there must be other factors that limit the types of mutations that can occur.  There are, but not as randomly as materialist biologists would have it.  And that is the entire point.  Nature is  skewed toward life.

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And now for some science news:

“Diamonds in Sudan meteorite ‘are remnants of lost planet’:  Scientists say rock fragments that hit the Earth in 2008 contain evidence of a lost planet that was part of the early solar system”

“No One Knows How Long the U.S. Coastline Is”

“‘Nuclear geyser’ may be origin of life: The perfect for conditions for life – including a handy power source – may have been a natural nuclear reactor on the early Earth.”