Page 120 - A Chain of Miracles

f
o

r
i
M

C
h
A A Chain of Miracles
n
i
a
a
e
s
c
l
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE FOR LIFE’S BUILDING BLOCKS TO
FORM BY THEMSELVES
Protein molecules are the building blocks of life, and even
the simplest one is so complex that it could never form acciden-
tally. An average protein consists of 288 amino acids of twelve

different types with 10 300 (an astronomical number with 300
zeros) possible different sequencing combinations. But only one
of these combinations can produce the relevant protein. All the
other combinations are dysfunctional, or even harmful, chains of
amino acids.
The probability of any such proteins to form by chance is 1
50
300
in 10 . And in mathematics, any probability smaller than 10 is
considered an impossibility.
Yet a protein consisting of 288 amino acids is a simple affair
when compared to the hugely complex proteins consisting of
thousands of amino acids, in living beings. Applying the same
probability calculation to these protein molecules makes the
word impossible inadequate to describe their forming by chance.
But examining at the next stage of life formation reveals that
proteins, by themselves, mean nothing much. Mycoplasma
Hominis H39 is one of the most primitive bacteria known to man,

but consists of 600 different proteins. In its case, we would have
to apply probability calculations to 600 different proteins, and
the results they would yield would be simply beyond impossi-
ble. Regardless of how much time we granted for amino acids to
form proteins, they never could form by chance. The American

1 118
1
8