Darwin is Crushed under the Numbers

As those who hold to a Biblical presupposition, namely that God’s Word is completely true and totally sufficient, we expect every facet of life down to the smallest details to accord with what the Bible says.  This means when science or psychology make proclamations that contradict what the Bible says, we continue to hold to the Bible and tell the scientist and the psychologist to go back and look harder.  Eventually, the Bible will be vindicated.  Archeologists are used to this happening.  Every time they say the Bible got it wrong, eventually they find something that makes them eat their words. 

While the scientific community is still overwhelmingly committed to macro-evolution, things are beginning to change.  More and more scientists are beginning to see the problems with evolution.  A recent book review drew out some details that were simply stunning and I wanted to share them with you.  David Gelernter wrote an essay for Claremont Review of books entitled Giving Up Darwin.  In this essay he writes about the devastating impact of a book called Darwin’s Doubt by Stephen Meyer.  Meyer was writing from a stand point of Intelligent Design, which is a scientific attempt to acknowledge some intelligent force working in the background without touching any of the religious implications or questions.  For people committed to Christ, we recognize this is just another less hostile form of truth suppression that Romans 1:18 speaks about.  Yet, the science being done is something we recognize as lining up with the Biblical account.  

Gelernter states that Darwin was brilliant with what he had to work with.  Darwin “successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances.”  But the big picture issue of the origin of new species is what is crumbling as new technology emerges, specifically molecular biology.  What Darwin could only see from the outside, we can now see from the inside.  Gelernter describes this like trying to explain a smartphone without any knowledge of the digital revolution or computer software.  To his credit, Darwin did well with what he had available. 

In molecular biology, the key player is the protein. 

“Proteins are the special ops forces (or maybe the Marines) of living cells, except that they are common instead of rare; they do all the heavy lifting, all the tricky and critical assignments, in a dazzling range of roles. And in doing these jobs and many others, the actual, 3-D shape of the protein molecule is important.”

“Proteins are chains: linear sequences of atom-groups, each bonded to the next. A protein molecule is based on a chain of amino acids; 150 elements is a “modest-sized” chain; the average is 250. Each link is chosen, ordinarily, from one of 20 amino acids. Chemical forces among the links make parts of the chain twist themselves…up like a complex sheet of origami paper. And the actual 3-D shape of the resulting molecule is (as I have said) important.”

Now here comes the big question.  Since Darwin was wanting to explain the origin of new species, the theory was that mutations got the job done.  Mutations that didn’t help were weeded out by natural selection.  Mutations that did help were passed along until eventually there was a completely new species.  So the question is, could mutations from existing genes or from the genetic gibberish that is found in genetic code, bring about positive change?  This is a question that can be answered by crunching the numbers.  Since molecular biology has opened to us the numbers of amino acids in a protein and the arrangement of them, what are the mathematical chances that good mutations could arise?

The numbers we are crunching are these:  A chain of 150 links and each link is chosen from 20 different amino acids.  How many different combinations can be created from those numbers?  The answer is around 10¹⁹⁵.  How big is that number?  It is estimated that there are only 10⁸⁰ atoms in the universe. 

What does this mean for mutations to hit on a useful protein? 

“He estimated that, of all 150-link amino acid sequences, 1 in 10⁷⁴ will be capable of folding into a stable protein. To say that your chances are 1in 10⁷⁴ is no different, in practice, from saying that they are zero. It’s not surprising that your chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore play a part in evolution, are even smaller. Axe puts them at 1 in 10⁷⁷.”

But what if you give everything enough time?  Won’t enough time allow for the ultra-rare useful mutations to happen?

“Consider the whole history of living things—the entire group of every living organism ever. It is dominated numerically by bacteria. All other organisms, from tangerine trees to coral polyps, are only a footnote. Suppose, then, that every bacterium that has ever lived contributes one mutation before its demise to the history of life. This is a generous assumption; most bacteria pass on their genetic information unchanged, unmutated. Mutations are the exception. In any case, there have evidently been, in the whole history of life, around 10⁴⁰ bacteria—yielding around 10⁴⁰ mutations under Axe’s assumptions. That is a very large number of chances at any game. But given that the odds each time are 1 to 10⁷⁷ against, it is not large enough. The odds against blind Darwinian chance having turned up even one mutation with the potential to push evolution forward are 10⁴⁰x(1/10⁷⁷)—10⁴⁰ tries, where your odds of success each time are 1 in 10⁷⁷—which equals 1 in 10³⁷. In practical terms, those odds are still zero. Zero odds of producing a single promising mutation in the whole history of life. Darwin loses. His idea is still perfectly reasonable in the abstract. But concretely, he is overwhelmed by numbers he couldn’t possibly have foreseen: the ridiculously large number of amino-acid chains relative to number of useful proteins. Those numbers transcend the details of any particular set of estimates.”

I believe this is another example of seeing that the science of biology is catching up to the statement of scripture.  Every single protein chain declares the glory of God and points us to his awesome wisdom.  The numbers simply crush any hope of this happening outside God’s creative and precise handiwork. 

Is this going to cause your neighborhood atheist to turn from evolution to the worship of Christ? No.  He will suppress the truth in some other creative way (it was aliens, I tell you).  Only the grace of God can take out the heart of stone and replace it with a heart of love to God.  Nonetheless, we continue to tell them that futility and contradiction is all they will find in their rejection of the God of the Bible.