Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

by Stephen C. Meyer

“If the odds of winning are one in a hundred million, and if a million people play every time, then it will take on average about a hundred drawings for someone to win.” If there are about a hundred drawings per year, with a million people playing per drawing, “then it would take about a year before someone won. But if there were only one drawing per year, on average it would take a century to hit the jackpot.”23 More frequent drawings produce shorter waiting times. Less frequent drawings tend to require longer waiting times. Similarly, more players will decrease the average time necessary to produce a winner, while fewer players result in longer waits. Similar mathematical principles apply when calculating the expected waiting times for the evolution of biological features by mutation and selection. Biologists first need to assess the complexity of the system—or its inverse, the improbability of the feature occurring. As in Powerball, however, knowing the probability of an event by itself does not allow someone to calculate how long it will likely take for that event to occur. Such a calculation requires also knowing the size of the population (equivalent to how many people are playing Powerball) and how frequently new genetic sequences arise (equivalent to how frequently drawings are held). In Powerball, a new sequence of numbers arises in every drawing. But when organisms reproduce, they do not always generate a new sequence of nucleotide bases in their individual genes...