Page 258 - Darwin's Dilemma: The Soul

Darwin’s Dilemma: The Soul

Stanley Miller

Today as we leave the twentieth century, we still face the biggest un-
solved problem that we had when we entered the twentieth century:
How did life originate on Earth? 153

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T The Complex Structure of Life

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The primary reason why the theory of evolution ended up in
such a great impasse regarding the origin of life is that even those
living organisms deemed to be the simplest have incredibly com-
plex structures. The cell of a living thing is more complex than all
of our man-made technological products. Today, even in the most
developed laboratories of the world, a living cell cannot be pro-
duced by bringing organic chemicals together.
The conditions required for the formation of a cell are too
great in quantity to be explained away by coincidences. The prob-
ability of proteins, the building blocks of a cell, being synthesized
coincidentally, is 1 in 10 950 for an average protein made up of 500
amino acids. In mathematics, a probability smaller than 1 over 10 50
is considered to be impossible in practical terms.
The DNA molecule, which is located in the nucleus of a cell
and which stores genetic information, is an incredible databank.
If the information coded in DNA were written down, it
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