So you're saying there's a chance . . .

You think Lloyd Christmas had some long odds? Wait till you hear this . . .

No doubt you've heard the scientific theory about how life began on Earth? Supposedly a long time ago in a warm pond a chance alignment of amino acids created the first primitive bacteria.

Well I'm hear to tell you that there's trouble in Evolution City. We evolved, for sure. The fossil record is there for all to see, but how life began and subsequently evolved is being looked at in a whole new light these days.

In May of 2001 Chandra Wickamasinghe and Fred Hoyle co-authored an article on the Action Science website entitled Evolution of Life: A Cosmic Perspective. As an introduction to the problems being encountered by evolution theory, I want to highlight section 12 of that article where the authors calculated the odds of amino acid molecules randomly lining up to form that first primitive bacteria. The odds are 1 in 10^500,000! Those are unimaginably low odds. Forget about Lloyd Christmas. If ever there was absolutely no chance of something happening, this is it.

Now Lloyd wouldn't give up that easy so we won't either. Let's have a look at just how long these odds are. After all, there could be trillions upon trillions of amino acids molecules, in billions and billions of ponds all over the Earth. The odds are long, yes, but over many many years, couldn't it still happen?

Nope, nadda, forget it . . . and I'll do a little example to help you (and Lloyd) see the light:

Assumption 1: let's suppose that the entire Earth's surface is covered in a 100km deep warm pool of amino acid molecules,

Assumption 2: let's take a guess that there are 100 trillion amino acid molecules in each millilitre of liquid (I actually have no idea how many would fit in a millilitre but that should be enough for our purposes),

Assumption 3: the amino acid molecules will be moving around in this warm liquid providing numerous opportunities for just the right alignment to occur. So lets say for each 600,000 amino acid molecule (the approximate number needed for a simple bacteria) they will move into a new position, or 'give it the old college try', about 1 million times a second (again I have no idea how fast these little things move but that should suffice).

Assumption 4: how about we let this soup steep for 50 billion years which is 10 times the approximate age of the Earth.

So what's the odds of this example producing a simple bacteria? The number of 'tries' is about 10⁵³ (I won't bore you with the math). Because of the large difference in magnitude between 10^500,000 and 10⁵³, the resulting odds can be approximated as the ratio of the two yielding 1 in 10^500,000/10⁵³ = 1 in 10^499,947!

Sorry Lloyd, but all those tries don't have any meaningful impact on those long odds.

So if a chance alignment of amino acid molecules is not possible then how did life start and evolve on Earth? I'm putting my money on a theory called Cosmic Ancestry. Cosmic Ancestry states that the genetic material needed for life was already present in the materials that formed Earth and that this material was the source of the beginings of life on Earth. It also states that evolution was driven by this original material as well as continual genetic seeding from microbes carried to Earth by comets. There's a lot of research going on right now to test this theory and the evidence is steadily mounting. Indeed, the theory maintains that this process continues today.

Cosmic Ancestry . . . it's got a nice ring to it doesn't it.

I'll have a lot more to say about this in the days to come.

Cheers.