And that was the problem, as the Wistar skeptics saw it: random mutations must do the work of composing new genetic information, yet the sheer number of possible nucleotide base or amino-acid combinations (i.e., the size of the combinatorial “space”) associated with a single gene or protein of even modest length rendered the probability of random assembly prohibitively small. For every sequence of amino acids that generates a functional protein, there are a myriad of other combinations that don’t.
