Page 168 - The Miraculous Machine that Works for an Entire Lifetime: Enzyme

Harun Yahya

What are the chances of getting just one simple enzyme only 100 amino
acid residues long? There are 20 different amino acids which could be

arranged in any combination of ways... The amino acids in this simple en-
zyme could be arranged 10 130 different ways—that is 10 with 130 zeros.
Most of these arrangements would not make good enzymes. Most of
them would work very poorly or not at all. Sir Arthur Eddington, a
British astronomer, calculated there are no more than 10 particles in the
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universe. Astronomers believe 90 to 99% of the universe is made of in-
visible particles called Dark Matter. This might increase the total number
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to 10 . This includes all the electrons, protons, and neutrons, and many
other less familiar subatomic particles. That should give you some idea of
how large 10 130 is.

It would take a very long time to find by chance the right combination of
amino acids to make some-thing as efficient as the enzymes in our bod-
ies. If we let everything in the universe combine and recombine to make
these protein chains of 100 amino acid residues at the rate of one trillion
times per second, it would take more than 30 trillion years before all the
combinations would have been tried. After these trials we would have
just one protein one hundred amino acids long with limited function and
no ability to reproduce, for protein does not code for itself, nor is it able
to effect its own replication. 94
The probability of obtaining a simple enzyme consisting of 100
amino acids at random are 1 in 10 130 . However, we also need to re-
member that this protein must consist of left-handed amino acids only.

(In nature, there are two kinds of amino acids: left and right-handed,
but only left-handed ones play any role in the living cell.) This means
that the probability declines still further:
What are the chances of a million-dollar laboratory correctly synthesizing
210
left-hand amino acids for one small protein molecule? It is 1 in 10 . That
is 1 with 210 zeros after it.
To properly understand the immense size of these impossible chances,

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