Extracted from our series, The New Scientific Evidence That Points to the Existence of God, Part 3. Edited for publication.
Dr. John Ankerberg: In your book, you explain that there is a mathematical reason that natural selection acting on random mutational changes in DNA will never generate new proteins or major changes in life. Tell us about that.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: If we consider a 12-character English word, for every arrangement that spells a valid word, there are roughly a hundred trillion gibberish sequences. There are so many ways to arrange 26 letters that finding a functional word is statistically rare. Biologists and mathematicians began asking in the 1960s if the same problem applies to DNA.
It turns out that the DNA protein system is subject to this same mathematical reality. There are vastly more ways to arrange DNA characters into non-functional gibberish than into stable, functional amino acid sequences. Consequently, random mutations are far more likely to degrade information than to build it.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: My colleague, Douglas Axe, spent 14 years at Cambridge University investigating the rarity of functional sequences. He analyzed a relatively short protein of about 150 amino acids. He discovered that for every stable, functional protein structure, there are 1077 possible gibberish sequences of amino acids that do not function.
This is comparable to a bike lock with 77 dials, each having 10 possibilities, where you must search for one specific combination. Even considering all the organisms that have ever existed on Earth—approximately 1040—we only have 1040 replication opportunities to search for a new functional sequence. Mathematically, this means random search can only cover a minuscule fraction of the total possibilities: 1 over 1037.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: This means you would only be allowed to search one ten-trillion-trillion-trillionth of the possible amino acid sequences throughout the entire history of life on Earth. A random mutation-selection mechanism is overwhelmingly more likely to fail than to succeed. It is not a plausible mechanism for generating new biological information, which presents a significant problem for standard evolutionary theory.
Continued in Part 3