Trying to Show Current Human Evolution, All They Have Is "Small Potatoes"

 There is some unintentional hilarity in the latest example of the "humans are still evolving" story that periodically appears (in slightly different forms) on science news sites.  The second photo in the article shows some hands holding small potatoes. The article is trying to claim that people living near the Andes mountains have evolved a better ability to digest small potatoes. The writer probably forgot that in English the phrase "small potatoes" is a figure of speech or expression meaning "something insignificant, of little importance." So the small potatoes visual symbolizes the examples discussed in the article, all of which are examples of unimpressive "small potatoes" microevolution. 

The first example given of current human evolution is the "small potatoes" example of lactose tolerance. Humans have been breeding cows for their dairy products for something like 10,000 years. It is claimed that about 10,000 years ago, only children could drink cows' milk, and that adults were unable to digest cows' milk. Supposedly there was a genetic variant allowing adults to digest cows' milk, and that such a variation became more common during over the past 10,000 years, allowing more and more adults to digest cows' milk. The evidence for this claim is rather weak, and even if it is true, the claimed example of evolution is only a not-very-impressive example of microevolution. 

The second example given of current human evolution is another "small potatoes" example of a small change in digestion: the claim that "Quechua people of highland Indigenous Andean ancestry" are better at digesting small potatoes. The third example is the  "small potatoes" example that some people living at high altitudes in Tibet have red blood cells with "unusually high oxygen saturation." This is a very minor bodily difference. 

We then have an example of how evolutionary narratives are adapted to fit any facts, in a "heads I win, tails you lose" manner. First the article suggests that darker skin evolved in Africa to protect from sun damage. Then the article suggests that lighter skin was favored in Europe, so that people could get more vitamin D from sunlight. There is no very strong evidence behind these claims, which in any case involve something only superficial (skin color). 

The final example of current human evolution cited by the article is a laughable one: an increase in nearsightedness. 

We read this:

"Myopia, or nearsightedness, has surged in the past few decades. In 2021, researchers found evidence in the UK Biobank that the condition is associated with mutant alleles.

These alleles have increased in frequency over the past 25 years, possibly because of natural selection. While nearsightedness might be a disadvantage for survival, some of the gene variants linked to this trait may have other advantages for reproduction."

Notice the "heads I win, tails you lose" type of affair going on. If nearsightedness is decreasing, and vision in a population is getting better, that will be cited as evidence of the amazing power of evolution to produce benefits in organisms. But if instead nearsightedness is increasing, and vision in a population is getting worse, that is also cited as evidence for the amazing power of evolution, with a "may have" and a "possibly" thrown in. 

Microevolution refers to minor examples of evolution. The word macroevolution refers to very big and very major examples of evolution, such as an evolution from microscopic organisms to large visible organisms, or an evolution from sea-dwelling organisms to land-dwelling organisms, or an evolution from non-flying organisms to flying organisms, or an evolution from ape-like creatures to humans. 

We know of a few minor examples of microevolution occurring in humans, such as the ability of more humans to digest lactose, and the ability of some humans to breathe better at high altitudes.  But no one has ever observed macroevolution in the human population or any other population of organisms. Macroevolution is the alleged appearance of major complex visible biological innovations in organisms due to natural evolutionary processes.  For example, if a species that did not have wings once evolved into a species that did have wings, that would be an example of macroevolution. And if a species that did not have eyes ever evolved into a species that did have eyes, that would be an example of macroevolution. 

Recorded history provides no example of macroevolution occurring in the human population or any other population of organisms. We have Egyptian statues and bas-reliefs of humans dating from 5000 years ago, and the humans depicted look just like the humans of today.  We have priceless ancient literary works such as those of Plato, proving that humans were capable of brilliant thought and writing thousands of years ago. If humans from five thousand years ago were transported to the current age and dressed in modern clothes, they could pass for modern humans. 

Evolutionary biologists claim there was in the past some huge amount of macroevolution that caused ape-like ancestors to transform into humans capable of speech, writing and city building. But a study of the growth of human population will cast doubt on such claims. 

The number of humans that have lived has been estimated at 100 billion. But a web site discussing this issue tells us that 99% of these people have lived in the past 10,000 years. Since 8000 BC some 100 billion humans have lived, but in the period between about 400,000 BC and 8000 BC, the total number of humans or pre-humans who lived was quite probably no greater than about a billion, and very probably less than 3 billion (the average population size being only about 20,000 or smaller for most of this time).  A web site discussing the issue states at 8000 B.C. the total number of humans who had ever lived was only about a billion. 

But we know there has been no macroevolution of humans since 8000 BC -- only a little microevolution like better lactose digestion and better high-altitude breathing in some people.  A statue from about 9000 BC shows a human with the modern human form, as do skulls and skeletons from around such a time.  We also know from archeological records that humans were building towns around such a time, in places such as Jericho. We also know from cave paintings that something like modern humans existed around 30,000 B.C.  

So if you believe the conventional account, you must believe that a totality of no more than 3 billion humans or pre-humans living before 8000 B.C. underwent enormous macroevolution (resulting in humans that had language, abstract thinking and symbolic abilities), but that in 100 billion humans living since 8000 BC there has been no such  macroevolution. Such an idea is not credible.  Why would there be such dramatic macroevolution during less than 3 billion lives, and no macroevolution during the subsequent period in which there were 100 billion human lives?  We would think the opposite would be more likely. 

A science site says, "An effective population size of 10,000 has been estimated for the most recent common ancestor of modern humans and of Neandertals (Ptak et al., cited in Premo and Hublin, 2009)." Conversely, our planet has had billions of humans for about 70 years. According to the account of our evolutionary biologists, from a population of only about 10,000 or a few tens of thousands of organisms before 50,000 B.C. there came some dramatic burst of macroevolution transforming ape-men into humans, but no such macroevolution has come from any of a population of billions of humans living in modern times. 

When discussing the unlikelihood of getting dramatic macroevolution from a small population, and the relation of population size to the likelihood of there appearing large complex evolutionary innovations, our biologists try their best to cloud the waters by distracting us with side points. But the matter will be more clear to anyone who considers a hypothetical example.  Requiring almost infinitely improbable protein molecule innovations and so much more, the appearance of a macroevolution innovation largely by random mutations can be compared to some typing monkey accidentally producing a brilliant essay or a clever computer program.  Now imagine if some huge group of scientists tested for years billions of monkeys trained to sit at keyboards and type, and saw no such worthy outputs ever appearing from their efforts.  It would then be very dubious for such scientists to claim that such worthy outputs came in the past from a group of only about 15,000 such typing monkeys.  It is just as dubious to claim that some tiny population of perhaps 15,000 pre-humans yielded some gigantic marvel of macroevolution resulting in speaking and writing humans, when no macroevolution at all has come from population sizes 300,000 times larger. 

The diagram below illustrates the difficulty. Each brick in the diagram represents very roughly a million human or pre-human lives, taking place after 200,000 B.C. According to the Darwinian account, there was some huge evolution leap at the very top of this pyramid,  in the time before 10,000 B.C.,  when there was only a total of a few million human lives or pre-human lives -- some giant leap transforming pre-humans into humans capable of building cities, talking, and writing books. But we know that there has been no major evolution in humans since 8000 B.C.  What sense does it make to think that Darwinian evolution would yield so great a leap in human abilities at the tiny top of such a pyramid, when there has been no such leap in the part of the pyramid constituting 99% of its weight?

Two Professors Mischaracterize Religious Belief

 At the site Aeon we have an article called "Believing and Thinking" by two professors who attempt to disparage religious belief by engaging in some scheme of categorization that does not make any sense and does not fit the facts. Their first mistake is to speak as if there are two types of beliefs: "matter-of-fact beliefs" that are based on evidence, and "religious beliefs" that are not based on evidence.  The authors claim "religious credence doesn’t depend on evidence in the way factual belief does."

Their claim that religious beliefs are not based on evidence is an incorrect example of what is called a sweeping generalization.  Some religious beliefs are not based on evidence, but are adopted as a "leap of faith" without reference to evidence. Other religious beliefs are very much based on evidence. 

For example, a person may belief in the existence of a divine creator or transcendent mind driving certain types of natural events. That belief may be very much based on evidence, including the following:

1. The evidence that our universe had a sudden fine-tuned beginning, in some event utterly beyond the power of natural science to explain, with the universe suddenly beginning in an enormously fine-tuned state needed for it eventually become a habitable universe where galaxies and stars like our sun to exist. 
2. The abundant evidence (widely discussed by physicists) that the laws and fundamental constants of our universe are very precisely fine-tuned to allow the existence of long-lived stars like our sun and carbon-based creatures such as ourselves, with their fine-tuning such as we would not expect to exist in even 1 out of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 random universes. 
3. The failure of scientists to ever credibly explain the origin of life, with all experiments trying to produce life from non-life being a dismal failure. 
4. The failure of scientists to ever credibly explain the origination of the type of cells in human bodies (eukaryotic cells), with the prevailing current "explanation" being a non-Darwinian "fairy tale" type of account that is no credible explanation. 
5. The failure of scientists to ever credibly explain the appearance of multicellular macroscopic organisms, with the appearance of such organisms not being explicable under any gradualist Darwinian account. 
6. The failure of scientists to ever credibly explain the appearance of millions of genes and protein molecules in the biosphere, because of the high functional thresholds of such fine-tuned components, under which there must be a very special arrangement of hundreds of parts before any function is obtained. 
7.  The failure of scientists to ever credibly explain human minds and human memory, which are not credibly explained by brains, for a host of reasons discussed at my site here. 
8. The failure of scientists to ever credibly explain the origin of an adult human body, there being no mechanistic explanation of how there could occur a progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast hierarchical organization of the human body (such a progression not being explained by DNA and its genes, which do not specify the structure of any human body or any of the cells that make up such a body). 

I could make a list equally long and substantive for the evidence reasons for believing in life after death. They would include a reference to evidence such as the fact that during cardiac arrest humans often report themselves moving out of their bodies and seeing their bodies from positions six feet away or more, just as if they had souls that can exist separate from the body. 

One of the main religious beliefs is the belief in a human soul. I have written more than 700 posts discussing the evidence supporting that belief, most of which are to be found at my site here, and in the series of posts here. And the evidence basis supporting such a belief is many times greater than my own writings on this topic. So when I hear people like the authors of this Aeon article try to claim or insinuate that religious beliefs are held by people having no interest in evidence, I regard that as being like someone claiming that there is no evidence basis for believing in global warming.  

So what can be said about the Aeon article professors who have tried to claim that religious belief is not based on evidence? Merely that they are guilty of sweeping generalizations that are not correct either in all cases or in all important cases.  From the fact that some religious beliefs are not based on evidence, our flubbing professors have tried to make the generalization that religious beliefs are in general not based on evidence. That is not true at all.  A correct generalization is that some religious beliefs are based on evidence and other religious beliefs are not based on evidence.  

We should laugh at the professors' clumsy attempts to try to establish their faulty sweeping generalization that religious belief does not rely on evidence. First they quote a Bible verse, which is rather ridiculous in an essay of this type. Then the professors cite a study, claiming that it showed that believers "report lower levels of confidence in the invisible religious entities they profess, like God and angels, than in invisible scientific entities, like germs and oxygen."  No, the study instead reported that "adults reporting low levels of religiosity expressed greater belief in the existence of scientific than religious entities but adults reporting high levels of religiosity expressed equivalent levels of belief in the existence of each domain." 

The professors then make this incorrect generalization: 

"Difference number 2: factual belief is highly vulnerable to evidence, while religious credence is not vulnerable to evidence." This is another pejorative sweeping generalization that is not uniformly true. I can give eight examples that discredit this generalization claiming that evidence cannot change a religious belief. 

Example #1. Christians originally believed that the Earth is only about 6000 years old, based on genealogies in the Bible that seemed to suggest only about 4000 years between the birth of Adam and the time of Jesus. However, faced with evidence that Earth is very much older than 6000 years, a large fraction of all Christians have dropped the belief that Earth is only about 6000 years old.  This is very much a modification of a religious belief based on evidence

Example #2.  In many cases a person may have believed that he is under the protection of God or some guardian angel, who will make sure he enjoys a happy life. After suffering some terrible misfortune (such as the death of a child or a terrible car accident or financial ruin), the person may revise such a religious belief, and may then start to believe that his life is largely a hard challenge or "trail of tears," a test of his soul to be endured with fortitude. When this happens, it is very much a revision of a religious belief, based on evidence. 

Example #3.  Around 1950, many Christians had the religious belief that homosexuality was a sin against God, based on a few Old Testament passages. It may have been easy to hold such a belief at that time, when gay people were "in the closet," with only a handful publicly declaring their homosexuality. But now there are millions or very many thousands of people who have declared themselves to be gay, and people have got evidence that homosexuals in general act like ordinary people and are in general people of good character. Faced with such evidence, very many Christians have discarded their previous belief that homosexuals are wicked sinners. That's a revision of a religious belief, based on evidence. 

Example #4.  Before the Protestant Revolution, the people who became Protestants in that revolution had various religious beliefs involving the Pope and the clergy, flattering beliefs that the clergy were called by God and that the Pope was the mouthpiece of God. But then there occurred events that shook such beliefs, such as the scandal of very many priests having concubines, the scandal of the sale of indulgences, the misdeeds of various popes, and so forth. Responding to such evidence, very many dramatically changed some of their religious beliefs, and started adhering to a new form of Christianity (Protestantism), with very different beliefs about the clergy and popes.  This was a major change in religious beliefs caused by evidence. 

Example #5: Christians have traditionally taught the religious belief that an afterlife will occur for someone only when the dead are physically resurrected by divine agency in some Last Days event that may be years in the future, an idea still held by very many millions.   However, the evidence for near-death experiences has caused many Christians to revise that belief, and to switch to a belief that humans have souls that survive death, with life after death occurring immediately after death. This was a major change in religious belief caused by evidence. 

Example #6: Many millions once believed in a religious doctrine called "the divine right of kings," the idea that kings get their authority from God, from a kind of "mandate of heaven." But such a doctrine was discarded by millions who got evidence of one or more kings behaving in an immoral way. This was a major change in religious belief caused by evidence. 

Example #7: In the United States, it has long been a matter of religious belief within certain Christian denominations that unconditional support must be given to the State of Israel (the reasons why are complicated, and have something to do with the fulfillment of biblical prophecies).  But in the light of evidence that the current or recent leaders of Israel have been guilty of horrendous brutality in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East, such a belief has substantially weakened, as shown by polls and the recent US election results. Once again, we have a substantial change in religious belief caused by evidence.  

Example #8: In the 17th century very many had the religious belief that Earth had been specially created at the center of the universe. Very many of the same people discarded that belief by the end of that century, as the evidence for heliocentrism became overwhelming.

With examples such as these being so easy to think of, I may ask: how could these two professors writing at Aeon have claimed that  "religious credence is not vulnerable to evidence"? Maybe they got such an idea through an ivory tower process of armchair reasoning, rather than a deep study of the history of religions and religious thought. 

The two professors refer to "the broad background of faithful who don’t usually pretend to treat their religious credence in an evidence-based way." To the contrary, religious people like to appeal to evidence almost as much as materialists do. My devoutly Catholic mother was always citing this or that fact or claimed observation to back up her religious beliefs.  And evangelical Christians frequently cite some personal "born again" experience as evidence backing up their belief system, while also frequently claiming that this or that event is evidence that scriptural prophecies have been fulfilled. Largely based on accounts of miracles, appeals to evidence have long been a very big part of the literature of Christianity, and a search on archive.org for "apologetics" will find very many volumes in such a literature. In England, Spiritualism is a religion; and it has always been very much an evidence-centered affair, having a very large literature of observational reports preserved at sites such as the iapsop.com site, which preserves two million periodical pages. 

The Aeon article authors try to insinuate that religious believers don't really believe very strongly, and some of their attempts to establish this claim are laughable flubs, such as their appeal to the claim that people in the Bible Belt watch pornography as much as people in less religious areas of the United States. The Bible does not mention pornography, nor does it condemn looking at naked bodies. The professors absurdly cite irrelevant studies, such as when they claim, "The experimental economist Erik Duhaime found that, in an economic game, 100 per cent of Moroccan shopkeepers in the Medina of Marrakesh chose the most charitable option while the call to prayer was audible, dropping to 50 per cent in the 20 minutes following it."

The next silly-sounding generalization of the two professors is this: "Difference number 3: religious credence is compartmentalised, while factual belief is uncompartmentalised." This is a vacuous-sounding statement, as the words "compartmentalised" and "uncompartmentalised" have no clear meaning. The use of imprecise smear words is a hallmark of lazy-thinking hate speech or language of derision. The professors err very badly when they state, "Factual belief is the evidence-responsive default cognitive map that guides action across settings, and religious credence is a chosen, compartmentalised cognitive map that becomes active in sacralised ritual settings." No, religious belief is not something that only "becomes active in sacralised ritual settings," but is something that exists equally in such settings and outside of such settings. 

At this point in the essay, you should shake your head, and ask: have these guys actually interviewed many religious people, or spent much  time talking to them? That's because it is very hard to imagine how anyone who had done that would ever claim or insinuate that religious belief is something that only switches on when someone goes to a church or a mosque. 

There are plenty of mistakes to be found in the doctrines of organized religion, so we may wonder why these two professors are pursuing this stereotype-heavy sweeping generalization style of criticism that is easy to defend against, rather than pursuing lines of criticism that are harder to defend against. 

One of the professor authors of the Aeon article is the author of a book with the title "Religion as Make Believe." Upon hearing that title which sounds so contemptuous, I assumed I was in the right ballpark by suspecting that his analysis was weaponized analysis intended to disparage. The title is an indication of the author getting things wrong.  In English "make believe" is an expression meaning an act of imagination in which someone pretends something which he thinks is not true. For example, an impoverished man might say to his wife, "Let us make believe that we are millionaires eating in a fancy restaurant." Adhering to a religion or some religious beliefs is not make believe.  Believers in religious doctrines believe such doctrines are correct. 

The song "Make Believe" from Showboat

Revisiting the Blogs Discussed in My Post "Blogs About the Future, Pessimistic and Optimistic"

My 2013 post " Blogs About the Future, Pessimistic and Optimistic" was one of my best-read posts of that year. Let's take at the current state of most of the blog sites I discussed in that post. 

Next Big Future. The site www.NextBigFuture.com is still running, and seems to be mainly a site giving you the latest press releases from AI companies or other high-tech companies.  The site is now very cluttered up with ads. 

Singularity Hub (www.SingularityHub.com). The site is still running, and also is mainly an echo chamber of the latest press releases from AI companies or other high-tech companies. 

Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence (http://www.kurzweilai.net) The link now takes you to a page that mainly just promotes books by Ray Kuzweil. We have a site with nothing but headlines or titles, and no paragraphs to be read. There's not even any much of any "teaser text" below the headlines or link titles -- maybe a sentence at most. Clicking on the links will mostly take you to skimpy articles in a small hard-to-read font. I may note the irony between Kurzweil's "progress is super-accelerating" claims and the poor design of this site, which seems more like a sign of the Internet getting worse than a sign of the Internet getting better. 

The Automatic Earth (www.theautomaticearth.com).  This link once took you to a fascinating pessimistic blog. The link now just takes you to a site with daily posts entitled "Debt Rattle."  Each post just has about ten links to other articles. I can no longer recommend this site. 

ApocaDocs (www.apocadocs.com). This site was a fine source of pessimistic information when I mentioned it in 2013. The site ran until 2016, but shut down then. 

Our Finite World (https://ourfiniteworld.com/). In 2013 this was a readable blog written by an actuary (Gail Tverberg) who wrote interesting, thoughtful articles about upcoming problems that may be caused by mankind overshooting its supply of resources such as oil. I see that the site is still running, with no change in its format; and the site is still getting frequent long posts by its author.  By now the site (which has been updated since 2007) has got 17 million page views. Although I have a doubt or two about the author's prophetic prowess, I can applaud her for maintaining a deep analysis ad-free blog for all of this long period. 

Collapse of Industrial Civilization (www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com) In 2013 this was a graphically slick blog taking a pessimistic view of the future. The blog seems to be still running full blast, continuing to post long posts several times a month. A major plus is that you can read 10+ long posts without doing any additional clicking once you reach the site.  And except for some ads in the left margin of the blog, the site is not cluttered up by any ads.  I have not read many of the posts, but I can at least applaud the physical design of a blog like this, which allows a reader to read a huge amount of text while staying on the same page, without the text being interrupted by ads.  This blog site has an excellent blogroll on its left margin, which allows you to discover many other blog sites. 

A University Press Release Is Mostly Honest, But Ends With "Seeds of Life" BS

Scientists have long appealed to the idea that chemical precursors of life were delivered to Earth eons ago by comets.  For example, the scientific paper here states, "Thus, comets may have imported prebiotic elements to early Earth, which, when mixed with liquid water, may have allowed the synthesis of all molecules thought to be necessary for the origin of life." This idea always seemed nutty, because a colliding comet would be vastly more destructive than an exploding atomic bomb, as the Google Gemini infographic below explains (mentioning that a colliding comet would have a force of trillions of megatons). 

The "delicate precursors of life from colliding comets" idea is  discredited by a recent press release from the University of Cambridge. We had this headline:

Comets probably didn’t seed life on Earth after all, new study suggests

We read this:

"The theory that comets delivered the molecular building blocks for life on Earth is a long-standing one, since comets are known to carry many of these molecules. However, a new study challenges this idea. 

The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, found the cometary delivery of these building blocks would be – at best – a ‘one-off fluke’, and not the steady rain of prebiotic molecules that had been theorised.

Using computer modelling, the researchers determined that comets travel too fast and at too sharp an angle to Earth’s atmosphere for the fragile organic molecules to survive: they would almost certainly vaporise on impact with the surface. However, the researchers also found that another planet in our system – Mars – could be a slightly more promising candidate for cometary delivery of prebiotic molecules, although this is still highly unlikely. The results are published in the journal Scientific Reports."

Referring to hydrogen cyanide, the scientific paper tells us that "HCN is the only feedstock molecule observed in Solar System comets in prebiotically relevant concentrations." That seems to discredit ideas that things such as amino acids (molecules needed for the origin of life, and much more complex than hydrogen cyanide) might have arrived from comets.  Referring to the delivery of life or its precursors to Earth from comets, the paper refers to "the crux of long-standing objections to cometary delivery, which relate to both the destruction of comets during atmospheric passage, and the thermal destruction of fragile organic species during hypervelocity impact."  The paper states, "Despite representing a best-case scenario for cometary delivery, our Monte Carlo simulations of Earth’s early cometary bombardment record, on average, zero cometary impacts delivering a prebiotically relevant concentration of HCN (> 10 mM)."

The paper authors state this:

"We have shown via Monte Carlo simulation of Earth’s cometary bombardment that these comets were, on the whole, unable to deliver these fragile organic molecules to Earth’s surface intact. Our results demonstrate that, on both global and local scales, cometary impacts provided an insignificant source of the concentrated feedstock molecules required for prebiotic chemistry, challenging the long-held hypothesis that comets played an important role in the origins of life on Earth."

No one should be surprised by this conclusion. The idea that something biological (or even complex chemistry) could come from a comet and survive the comet crashing into Earth (and without being incinerated as the comet came through the atmosphere) was always hugely unbelievable. There's a reason why meteors light up the sky so dramatically as fireballs entering the atmosphere. It's because some rock has become super-heated.  

The University of Cambridge press release announcing these findings does not manage to inform us intelligently throughout its text. Instead, at its end it shifts into BS-shoveling mode (a mode that very many university press releases shift into at their very beginning).  Near its end, the press release states this:

"So where did the molecular seeds of life on Earth come from? The researchers say there are several possibilities, including the synthesis of these molecules following the impact of asteroids, which hit the Earth far more frequently than comets. Or, the chemical precursors formed from processes that occurred on Earth itself, without any outside interference." 

Alas, we have the utterly unscientific has-no-basis-in-fact idea that there is any such thing as "seeds of life." What is a seed? It is something that will grow into a living plant, as long as you supply sunlight, water and soil. Do we know of any such thing corresponding to the appearance of life from non-life? No, we do not.  There are no chemicals that cause life to appear from a sterile environment without life. There are no such things as "seeds of life." The use of that term is very misleading language by scientists and science journalists talking about the origin of life. 

Claiming that there are chemicals that are "seeds of life" causing life to arise from non-life is as misleading as claiming that there are types of nuts or bolts that are seeds of automobiles. The number of well-arranged parts in even the simplest self-reproducing cell is comparable to the number of well-arranged parts in an automobile. A car has about 30,000 well-arranged parts. Even the simplest self-reproducing cell requires hundreds of types of proteins, each of which has an average of hundreds of very well-arranged amino acids. Multiply 200 by 200 and you get 40,000.

As for the idea that you could have got the complex components needed for life from asteroids bombarding Earth, all we should say about that is: crazy as colliding comets. 

I'll end by citing the first quote in my "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" post:

"The transformation of an ensemble of appropriately chosen biological monomers (e.g. amino acids, nucleotides) into a primitive living cell capable of further evolution appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of superastronomical proportions (Appendix A), an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the Earth except, we believe, as a miracle (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981, 1982, 2000). All laboratory experiments attempting to simulate such an event have so far led to dismal failure (Deamer, 2011; Walker and Wickramasinghe, 2015)." -- "Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?," a paper by 21 scientists,  2018.