Why Accidents Cannot Produce Very Complex and Useful Instruction Information

Darwinist materialism is built upon the idea that accidents of nature can produce dazzling works of biological construction.  In this post I will explain a small part of the reason why this idea is irrational and utterly unbelievable. Part of the reason is that accidents cannot produce very complex instruction information. By very complex instruction information I mean the type of information you would need to construct some complex thing such as a house, a car, a cell or even a large protein molecule with a specific biological function. 

Let us start with a simple case of probability calculation. What is the chance that a random string of five English characters would produce a five-letter word in the English language? To calculate this, you need to answer two questions:

(1) How many random combinations of five English characters would result in a word in the English language?

(2) How many possible five-character strings of letters could you produce from random combinations of characters?

A Google query of "number of five letter words in English" will give you the answer to the first question. The answer is that there are roughly 100,000 to 120,000 five-letter words in the English language. 

The second question can be answered using the mathematical rule that the number of possible combinations of a sequence of characters or digits is roughly equal to the number of possible values in each position of the sequence multiplied by itself a number of times equal to the length of the sequence.  So, for example:

• There are 10 possible digits between 0 and 9, so the total number of possible decimal digit sequences with a length of 5 is roughly equal to 10 multiplied by itself 5 times, which equals 100000. (I say "roughly equal" because the exact number is all the numbers between 10,000 and 99,999, which is 99,000 numbers.) 
• Counting only lowercase letters and digits (a to z and 0 to 9), there are 36 possible characters that can exist in any position in a five-character sequence. The total number of possible five-character character sequences is roughly 36 multiplied by itself five times, which is 60,466,176. 

So what is the chance of a random set of five characters being a word in the English language? The answer is roughly 120,000 divided by 60,466,176, which is 0.00198.  This is roughly about 1 chance in 500. 

Now, imagine we want to calculate the chance of a long series of randomly typed characters producing nothing but words in the English language. To keep things simple, we can calculate this random typing as being a series of five random characters, each followed by a space. If we want to calculate a series of x randomly typed groups of five characters all being words in the English language, we will have to multiply .000198 by itself x times. 

So, for example, the probability of typing 100 consecutive random five-letter sequences and having them all be words in the English language is roughly 1 in 500 (or .000198) to the hundredth power. You can calculate things like this using what is called a large exponents calculator. Using such a calculator, we find that 1 in 500 to the hundredth power is roughly equal to 1 in 10 to the 269th power. 

The large exponents calculator above for some reason prefers to work with integer numbers rather than decimal numbers such as .000198. But since .000198 is very close to 1 in 500, and we are only interested in getting an answer roughly correct, we can simply type 500 in the first input slot above, and remember to divide by 1 the total produced. 

We see that the probability of you typing 100 random five-character sequences and having them all be words in the English language is roughly 1 in ten to the 288th power. This is a number so low that it is prohibitive. Things with this improbability would never occur in the entire history of the universe. 

But what about the probability of you randomly typing 100 random five-character sequences and producing some complex and useful instruction information such as how to build a complex and useful building or invention, or at least one of its parts? Would it be less or greater than the incredibly low probability calculated above? It would surely be very much less, because the calculation above does not even take into account the need to arrange the words in a meaningful order. It is much, much more improbable for randomly generated output to produce a useful instruction sentence such as "use a hammer and nails to hammer together all the wood two-by-fours" than it is is for random words to produce a meaningless but correctly spelled sentence such as "house smart green taste works south quick." So given the previous calculations we are safe in assuming that typing 100 five-character sequences of randomly typed text will produce a useful instruction sentence with a probability very much less than 1 in ten to the 288th power. 

Now, let us consider the instruction information in biology. In biology we have the most gigantic "missing specifications" problem described in detail here. This is because contrary to the false claims that have so often been made, nowhere in DNA or its genes has anyone discovered anything like the instructions needed to build a body or any of its organ systems or any of its organs or any of its cells.  DNA and its genes do not even specify how to build any of the organelles that are the main building components of cells. But we do know that DNA does contain a huge repository of instruction information. The DNA in humans contains more than 20,000 genes. Each of those genes tells how to make a particular polypeptide chain that is the starting point for a particular protein molecule. Such a polypeptide chain is a sequence of amino acids. 

In terms of complexity and functional usefulness, there is a great deal of similarity between a gene and the 100-word instruction sequence I previously imagined.  Simplifying things, I previously imagined 36 possible values at each position in the random sequences I was imagining. For a gene we have a similar situation. A gene specifies a sequence of amino acids, usually hundreds and sometimes thousands. There are twenty amino acids that are used by living thing. Any position in a gene can specify any of twenty amino acids. 

So the math we have with genes is similar to the math previously imagined.  I was previously imagining a sequence of 500 random characters (100 words each consisting of five random characters). The average length of a human gene is a size needed to specify about 450 amino acids. Human protein molecules are in eukaryotic cells, and the scientific paper here says, "Eukaryotic proteins have an average size of 472 aa [amino acids]." And just as the chance of you making a useable English instruction sentence from about 500 random characters is incredibly low (less than 1 chance in 10 to the 288th power), the chance of you getting a useful gene from a random sequence of nucleotide base pairs specifying a random sequence of amino acids is incredibly low. To be functional, a protein molecule half-specified by a gene requires a very special three-dimensional structure, that uses a very hard-to-achieve effect called folding. A functional gene and a corresponding functional protein molecule requires a very special arrangement of amino acids, as special as the arrangement of characters in a functional instruction sentence. 

The fact that protein molecules require very rare and special sequences of amino acids is shown by how sensitive protein molecules are to small changes. Below are some relevant quotes by scientists:

• "It seems clear that even the smallest change in the sequence of amino acids of proteins usually has a deleterious effect on the physiology and metabolism of organisms." -- Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, "The triple helix : gene, organism, and environment," page 123.
• "Proteins are so precisely built that the change of even a few atoms in one amino acid can sometimes disrupt the structure of the whole molecule so severely that all function is lost." -- Science textbook "Molecular Biology of the Cell."
• "To quantitate protein tolerance to random change, it is vital to understand the probability that a random amino acid replacement will lead to a protein's functional inactivation. We define this probability as the 'x factor.' ...The x factor was found to be 34% ± 6%."  -- 3 scientists, "Protein tolerance to random amino acid change." 
• "Once again we see that proteins are fragile, are often only on the brink of stability." -- Columbia University scientists  Lawrence Chasin and Deborah Mowshowitz, "Introduction to Molecular and Cellular Biology," Lecture 5.
• "We predict 27–29% of amino acid changing (nonsynonymous) mutations are neutral or nearly neutral (|s|<0.01%), 30–42% are moderately deleterious (0.01%<|s|<1%), and nearly all the remainder are highly deleterious or lethal (|s|>1%).” -- "Assessing the Evolutionary Impact of Amino Acid Mutations in the Human Genome," a scientific paper by 14 scientists. 
• "An analysis of 8,653 proteins based on single mutations (Xavier et al., 2021) shows the following results: ~68% are destabilizing, ~24% are stabilizing, and ~8,0% are neutral mutations...while a similar analysis from the observed free-energy distribution from 328,691 out of 341,860 mutations (Tsuboyama et al., 2023)...indicates that ~71% are destabilizing, ~16% are stabilizing, and ~13% are neutral mutations, respectively." -- scientist Jorge A. Villa, "Analysis of proteins in the light of mutations." 2023.
• "Proteins are intricate, dynamic structures, and small changes in their amino acid sequences can lead to large effects on their folding, stability and dynamics. To facilitate the further development and evaluation of methods to predict these changes, we have developed ThermoMutDB, a manually curated database containing >14,669 experimental data of thermodynamic parameters for wild type and mutant proteins... Two thirds of mutations within the database are destabilising." -- Eight scientists, "ThermoMutDB: a thermodynamic database for missense mutations," 2020. 

Genes contain very complex and useful instruction information. But getting such information by chance is very roughly as improbable as getting useful instruction information from randomly generated text. A gene tells much of what is needed to construct a particular type of complex invention: a protein molecule. A protein molecule is a very special arrangement of hundreds or thousands of amino acids, which have to be just right for that particular type of protein molecule to perform its function.  Human DNA has roughly 20,000 genes, each of which largely tells how to make a different type of complex invention in your body: a particular type of protein molecule with hundreds or thousands of well-arranged parts. The extreme sensitivity and fragility of protein molecules (discussed in the bullet list above) tells us how very special is the required arrangement that must occur in every human gene. 

The likelihood of random mutations producing a novel type of gene that could serve as instructions for how to make a new type of functional protein is roughly the same as the likelihood of 500 randomly typed characters producing a useful and very complex instruction. The chance of both of these things is so very low as to be prohibitive. The chance of some accident or series of accidents producing from scratch either a new useful type of gene or protein or a new useful 100-word instruction is basically zero, so low that we would never expect it to ever happen in the history of the universe. 

From such realities we can derive the very general principle that accidents cannot produce very complex and useful instruction information. This principle matches our intuitions. If someone ever claimed that he spilled a big box of 500 Scrabble letters, and that they fell on the floor and accidentally produced a 100-word complex instruction that was very useful, you would never believe such a tale. 

 But what about all the biologists who tell us that all of the millions of types of genes and millions of types of protein molecules in the animal kingdom are the result of accidents of nature, mere random mutations? They are believing the worst type of nonsense. Believing in such a thing is as illogical as believing that all of the books in a huge public library were written by mere ink splashes, rather than the purposeful intention of authors. 

What happened was that between 1875 and 1925 Darwinism became a sacred dogma of the conformist belief communities that reside in the biology departments of universities. In the next decades scientists discovered how mountainous is the organization and information richness of living things. Biologists discovered around the middle of the 20th century that humans require an information richness and level of hierarchical organization vastly beyond anything they had ever been  imagined. At that time all claims of understanding the origin of species and the origin of humans should have been abandoned. 

But by then biologists had already made Darwin their Jesus or Buddha, and had made Darwin's boasts of explaining biological origins some sacred dogma that was not to be questioned. So the groundless boast that biologists had explained human origins and the origin of other species continued to be taught, just like some religious dogma that continues to be taught even after facts have discredited it. The biologists made it clear they despised the fundamentalists who clung to the idea that mankind was only about 6000 years old. But by clinging to the discredited explanation boasts of Darwinism, such biologists were acting in the same way as such fundamentalists, clinging to a discredited belief tradition rather than updating their  claims to fit the observed facts. 

And what if you somehow had an explanation for the accidental origin of all the genes in the human body, despite all the reasons discussed above for thinking such a thing is impossible? Then you still wouldn't have a tenth of an explanation for how there arose human bodies, because DNA and its genes do not specify how to make human bodies or any organs or any cells or even any of the organelles that are the building components of such cells. And you also would not have an explanation for human minds and their capabilities, because neither genes nor brains explain such capabilities, for reasons discussed at great length in the posts on my site here. 

You might try to  defeat some of the reasoning above by appealing to possibilities such as lower functional thresholds (such as rare types of protein molecules that might be functional in half form).  Such attempts could easily be demolished by a discussion of facts arguing far more strongly in the opposite direction, such as the fact that most types of protein molecules produce no survival benefit or reproduction benefit by themselves, but only are beneficial when they act as team members in biological components of far greater complexity, such as protein complexes requiring many types of proteins to be useful. A proper study of functional thresholds and interdependent components always undermines the explanatory boasts of biologists rather than supporting them.