Ankerberg: This next clip explains why Darwin’s
theory of natural selection and random mutation
cannot account for what is needed to build
a Cambrian animal.
Folks, I want you to listen.
Narrator: Each of the thousands of different
proteins in nature is actually a chain made
from a specific combination of 20 different
amino acids.
The sequential order of these chemical building
blocks is crucial; for if they are arranged
correctly, the chain folds into a functioning
three-dimensional molecule.
But if the amino acids are incorrectly assembled,
no protein will form.
If proteins are indeed rare among the possible
sequences of amino acids, what are the odds
that mutations would stumble upon a functional
combination of chemicals from the vast number
of alternatives?
To find out, Axe randomly altered the structures
of an enzyme protein comprised of 150 amino
acids.
Stephen Meyer: You’ve got a protein 150
amino acids longs.
Then you’ve got 20150 possible ways of arranging
the amino acids.
Out of all those possibilities, how many are
functional and how many are gibberish?
Doug Axe: If you do the experiments, and you
analyze how much information is required to
get, say, a new protein fold, it’s just
far beyond what you can get by random mutation
and natural selection.
Narrator: How far beyond?
Axe published his findings in the Journal
of Molecular Biology.
He determined that among all the possible
amino acid combinations, the probability of
generating just one short protein by mutation
is roughly one in 1074, or one chance in 100
trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion,
trillion.
Stephen Meyer: To put that in context, there’s
only 1065 atoms in the entire galaxy.
So to build a new functional protein by selection
and mutation within the time allowed for the
Cambrian explosion, what you’re essentially
having to do is equivalent to a blindfolded
man looking throughout the entire galaxy for
one marked atom.
So what we’re talking about is searching
for a tiny, tiny needle in an enormous haystack,
and having a very limited time to search.
Doug Axe: So, on the question of something
like the Cambrian explosion, there does not
appear to be any way that unguided, random
mutations can accomplish what needs to be
accomplished to explain new functional proteins.
And certainly, by extension, wherever in the
history of life you would need to have multiple
new protein folds, the probabilities multiply.
So there’s no reason to think that this
is plausible.
Ankerberg: Dr. Meyer, that’s really impressive.
Do you have another way of illustrating what
we just saw?
Meyer: Well, we talked in the last episode
about a bike lock as an illustration.
You have a thief who wants to perform a random
search to find a combination in order to steal
a bike.
He comes up against a big hurdle, and that
is the number of combinations that have to
be searched.
In a four-dial bike lock you have ten digits
on each dial, so you’ve got ten times ten
times ten times ten, or 10,000 possibilities
that have to be searched.
But depending on how much time is available,
it could either be plausible that the search
will be successful randomly, or implausible.
What Axe has shown is that in the case of
even a single gene or protein—Douglas Axe,
the scientist that we saw in the last clip—is
that in the case of even a single gene or
protein, the number of dials that we are affectively
looking at is about 74, depending—the slight
differences in his estimates depending on
the method he uses—where you’ve got ten
possibilities at each dial, so that’s an
enormous number of combinations that correspond
to that.
That’s one in 1074 combinations.
Now, that number is so big—it’s many orders
of magnitude greater than the number of atoms
that exist in the Milky Way galaxy—that
you can see that you would have to be looking
a long, long, long time by random means to
sample more than half of those possibilities.
Once you get beyond half, then you can say
it’s more likely that you’ll succeed than
you will fail.
But because the number is so big, there’s
so many possible ways of arranging those amino
acids or the letters in the DNA code that
would correspond to building those proteins,
that even on the scale of cosmic time, or
on the scale of the history of life on earth,
you’re going to not have nearly enough time
to sample but a tiny fraction of that total
number of combinations.
Which means it’s going to be overwhelmingly
more likely that a random search will fail
to find even a single functional gene or protein
in the known history of life on earth than
it is that such a random search will succeed.
And if it’s overwhelmingly more likely,
that a random search will fail to find a new
gene or protein, fail to generate new genetic
information, then the hypothesis that such
a search succeeded is actually more likely
to be false than true, in which case that’s
a bad hypothesis and we should reject it.
