Denton explained why the mechanism of random mutation and natural selection also faces a combinatorial problem.15 He did so by drawing an analogy to English text. As Denton noted, linguists have estimated that for every meaningful sequence of English characters 12 letters long there are one hundred trillion (i.e., 100,000,000,000,000, or 1014) corresponding gibberish sequences of the same length—effectively a lock with fourteen dials and ten digits but only one combination.
