I know that these discussions have been made to death, but I’ve never thrown in my two cents, and I wanted to give it a shot.
JubilationTCornpone… let’s take a look at that name. By my count, 19 letters, both upper-case and lower-case. What are the odds that you’d pick exactly that combination? Well, my statistics are a little rusty, but it seems that you could have picked any one of 52 characters to put in any one place (excluding punctuation). That seems to me to be (1/52)^19 = 2.49 x 10^-33. I’m not even going to try and come up with an analogy for a number that infinitesimal. I’ve heard things about the odds of baseballs being in one precise location in the solar system, or atoms in the Astrodome, or other silly things. Basically, we can call that chance nil. The chances of you picking exactly that combination are nil.
Aha, you exclaim with glee, there’s a difference here–the sequence of letters is not random. You work within a framework, the framework of the English language. Therefore, the combination “Jubilation” is much more likely than “fhIjdkeLZo” because the first is “acceptable” in English; it’s an actual word. You’re working under a governing set of rules… rules which might be somewhat relaxed in this situation (how often does one see the word Cornpone anyways??), but there are still SOME rules. So, therefore, your choice of name ISN’T random; it was governed by a set of rules, which implies intelligence.
The situation is SIMILAR in chemistry, but not the same. There ARE rules in the chemistry that govern which amino acids come together. Just like above, there are certain patterns which are more “acceptable” than others. Some combinations seem to just WORK, i.e., they bond and they like it that way. Other combinations suck… a bond may form, but it’s so labile that it’s just as likely to blow apart as it is to exist. This is especially true when you get into the secondary, tertiary, and quarternary structure of proteins. Certain things are more likely to occur… we coin phrases such as “like attracts like,” meaning that amino acids we term “hydrophilic” are going to twist the forming protein to be with other hydrophilic amino acids.
However, the presence of a simple system of rules does NOT imply intelligence, anthropormorphism, or anything other than some simple principles. Principles such as electromagnetic attraction and repulsion, hydrogen bonding, steric hinderance, etc. No one seems to contend that water and oil separate by the grace of God; people are content knowing that they repel because they’re different (polar vs. nonpolar). Why do we need to invoke God to explain these combinations of amino acids?
So, in short, combinations of amino acids are not RANDOM, as the statistics imply. That makes formation of proteins much more probable.
I’m going to point out one other thing… do people realize how BIG Avogadro’s Number is? 6.022 x 10^23. That’s a tremendous number. Suppose we have a primordial with 1 gram of aspartic acid and 1 gram of glutamic acid. That’s not a whole lot, is it? I mean, 1 piddling gram of each? Please. But at the molecular level, that’s a huge amount! In terms of molecules, we have 4.52 x 10^21 molecules of aspartic acid and 4.09 x 10^21 molecules of glutamic acid. The odds of the two coming together are still astronomical… now they’re just astronomically high!
These scenarios are NOT a stretch; they’ve been done before. God Bless Dr. Stanley Miller.
Quix