Can Evolution Produce an Eye? Not a Chance!
by Dr. David N. Menton, Ph.D.
This version copyright (c) 1994 by:
Missouri Association for Creation
[No. 10 in a series] April 1994, Vol. 4, No. 4
The human brain consists of approximately 12 billion cells,
forming 120 trillion interconnections. The light sensitive retina
of the eye (which is really part of the brain) contains over 10
million photoreceptor cells. These cells capture the light pattern
formed by the lens and convert it into complex electrical signals,
which are then sent to a special area of the brain where they are
transformed into the sensation we call vision.
In an article in _Byte_ magazine (April 1985), John Stevens
compares the signal processing ability of the cells in the retina
with that of the most sophisticated computer designed by man, the
Cray supercomputer:
"While today's digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is
clear that the human retina's real-time performance goes
unchallenged. Actually, to simulate 10 milliseconds (one hundredth
of a second) of the complete processing of even a single nerve
cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500
simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would
take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray
supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more
such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would
take a minimum of 100 years of Cray time to simulate what takes
place in your eye many times every second."
If a supercomputer is obviously the product of intelligent design,
how much more obviously is the eye a product of intelligent
design? And yet, evolutionists are dead certain that the human eye
(and everything
else in nature) came into being by pure chance and the intrinsic
properties of nature! Evolutionists occasionally admit that it is
difficult for even them to believe such a thing. Ernst Mayr, for
example, has conceded that:
"...it is a considerable strain on one's credulity to assume that
finely balanced systems such as certain sense organs (the eye of
vertebrates, or the bird's feather) could be improved by random
mutations." (Systematics and the Origin of Species_, p. 296).
Evolutionists rarely attempt to calculate the probability of
chance occurrence in their imagined evolutionary scenarios. While
there is no way to measure the probability of chance occurrence of
something as complex as the eye, there are ways to calculate the
probability of the chance occurrence of individual protein
molecules that are essential to life. Over a thousand different
kinds of proteins have been identified in the human body, and each
has a unique chemical composition necessary for its own particular
function.
Proteins are polymers, whose chemical composition depends on the
arrangement of many smaller subunits called amino acids. There are
20 different kinds of amino acids that are used to construct the
proteins
of all living organisms, including man. These amino acids are
linked together end-to-end (like a string of beads) to form a
single protein macromolecule. The average protein consists of a
string of 500 amino
acids. The total number of combinations of 20 different amino
acids in such a string is, for all practical purposes, unlimited.
Each protein in our body, however, must contain a specific
sequence of amino acids if it is to function properly. It is the
task of the genetic system in our cells to organize the assembly
of the amino acids into precisely the right sequence for each
protein.
Proteins have been called _informational_ macromolecules because
their amino acid sequence spells out information, in much the same
way
as the letters of the alphabet can be arranged to form a sentence
or paragraph. We can appreciate the improbability of randomly
assembling one of the essential proteins of life by considering
the probability of randomly assembling the letters of the alphabet
to form even a simple phrase in English.
Imagine if we were to try to spell out the 23 letters and spaces
in the phrase "THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION" by using the evolutionary
principle of chance. We might proceed by randomly drawing
characters from a Scrabble set consisting of the 26 letters of the
alphabet plus a space (for a total of 27). The probability of
getting any particular letter or space in our phrase using this
method would be one chance out of 27 (expressed as 1/27). The
probability of getting all 23 letters and
spaces in the order required for our phrase can be calculated by
multiplying together the probability of getting each letter and
space (1/27 x 1/27 x 1/27 -- for a total of 23 times). This
calculation reveals that we could expect to succeed in correctly
spelling our phrase
by chance, approximately _once_ in eight hundred, million,
trillion, trillion draws! If we were to hurry the process along
and draw our letters at the rate of a billion per second, we could
expect to spell our simple little phrase once in 26 thousand,
trillion years! But even this is a "virtual certainty" compared to
the probability of correctly assembling any one of the known
biological proteins by chance!
The 500 amino acids that make up an average-sized protein can be
arranged in over 1 x 10^600 different ways (that's the number ONE
followed by 600 zeros)! This number is vastly larger than the
total number of atomic particles that could be packed into the
known universe. If we had a computer that could rearrange the 500
amino acids of a particular protein at the rate of a billion
combinations a second, we would stand essentially no chance of
hitting the correct combination
during the 14 billion years evolutionists claim for the age of the
universe. Even if our high-speed computer were reduced to the size
of an electron and we had enough of them to fill a room measuring
10 billion light years square (about 1 x 10^150 computers!), they
would
still be exceedingly unlikely to hit the right combination. Such a
"room" full of computers could only rearrange about 1 x 10^180
combinations in 300 billion years. In fact, even if all the
proteins that ever existed on earth were _all different_, our
"room" full of
computers would be exceedingly unlikely to chance upon the
combination of _any one of them_ in a mere 300 billion years!
Evolutionists counter that the whole probability argument is
irrelevant since evolution is utterly purposeless, and thus never
tries to make anything in particular! They insist, more over, that
"natural
selection" makes the impossible, possible. But evolutionists were
vigorously challenged on this claim by mathematicians in a
symposium held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the
proceedings were published in the book, _Mathematical Challenges
to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution_) Murray Eden,
Professor of Engineering at M.I.T. said:
"The chance emergence of man is like the probability of typing at
random a meaningful library of one thousand volumes using the
following procedure: Begin with a meaningful phrase, retype it
with a few mistakes, make it longer by adding letters; then
examine the result to see if the new phrase is meaningful.
Repeat this process until the library is complete."
I will leave it to the reader to consider the probability that an
intelligent Designer and Builder can intelligently design and build an
eye.
Dr. Menton received his Ph.D. in Biology from Brown University. He
has been involved in biomedical research and education for over 30
years.
Dr. Menton is President of the Missouri Association for Creation,
Inc.
Originally published in:
St. Louis MetroVoice
PO Box 220010
St. Louis, MO 63122
Corrections and revisions have been made by the
author from the original published essay.
This text file prepared and distributed
by the Genesis Network (GenNet).
