“Even,” I asked, “if the first molecule had been much simpler than those today?” “There’s a minimal complexity threshold,” he replied. “There’s a certain level of folding that a protein has to have, called tertiary structure, that is necessary for it to perform a function. You don’t get tertiary structure in a protein unless you have at least seventy-five amino acids or so. That may be conservative. Now consider what you’d need for a protein molecule to form by chance.
