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

by Stephen C. Meyer

This means that an average-length protein represents just one possible sequence among an astronomically large number—20300, or over 10390—of possible amino-acid sequences of that length. Putting these numbers in perspective, there are only 1065 atoms in our Milky Way galaxy and 1080 elementary particles in the known universe. That is what bothered Eden and other mathematically inclined scientists at Wistar. They understood the immensity of the combinatorial spaces associated with even single genes or proteins of average length. They realized that if the mutations themselves were truly random—that is, if they were neither directed by an intelligence nor influenced by the functional needs of the organism (as neo-Darwinism stipulates)—then the probability of the mutation and selection mechanism ever producing a new gene or protein could well be vanishingly small. Why? The mutations would have to generate, or “search” by trial and error, an enormous number of possibilities—far more than were realistic in the time available to the evolutionary process. Eden pointed out in his Wistar presentation that the combinatorial space corresponding to an average-length protein (which he assumed to be about 250 amino acids long) is 20250—or about 10325—possible amino-acid arrangements. Did the mutation and selection mechanism have enough time—since the beginning of the universe itself—to generate even a small fraction of the total number of possible amino-acid sequences corresponding to a ...