- The Rip Saw
- |
- Exalted Mythic Member
And now for another insanely long, impossibly difficult to understand post from yours truly:Posted by: The Rip Saw
A very good question, and one that requires a very solid understanding of chemistry to fully understand. I could explain the basics to everyone, but you better know something about probability. In other words, if I flip a coin once every second for a billion years, what are the odds that 50 tails would come up in a row?*
A: The odds are infinitely large that it would happen at least once. The only thing that can make highly improbable events occur (such as life) is time.*P.S. Before, I had the probability of heads not coming for an hour. Later that night, I decided that the odds of no heads for an hour might be larger than I initially thought. So I did the math, and came up with the odds of 3,600 heads would be 2 to the 3,600th power, or 2 multiplied by itself 3, 600 times. That number is 1 in 51048665143419455907108426515682819201016709639403 01617298884589783947025654989209426383867325613524 54335141683359776412745694691644608178180901054998 65533577414991902231364412516344895866529422745373 84864347088262714867022887786366083090924141383506 22943985297737700390054834889835184325930591704592 48537716325243702439276517438454887374168748058483 68486492650738383584061192790228759690288354373732 12391543001823461997525404290885893862505930807247 83123563630810183462765489190029175832481515325237 90105677074132985556300525623246994398997696641975 57634386075143421657370293876612416619863090162443 94647935816075219873537505955738878227931237058180 50746432686022104079817609890994191214546801218255 87201870338560834519404309249162089221030204672558 26830294891366037746825676802826326857577117644053 03795386293220314902546474539632698134739750566765 42709984831393225608187263351331448312883188148186 71848965493090617881400152310683414219625041202818 83042706210346559274047369836280866215728520613525 44785737393777019989488725899744965810617472190984 2993657489968700917291224846565376, or about 1 in 5x10^1,083.
That number is, by far and away by a factor larger than is fathomable, bigger than the number of atoms in the universe. Also, there are only 31,557,600,000,000,000 or 3.15576x10^16 seconds in a billion years. Obviously, that simply isn't enough time to make all tails for an hour occur. In fact, all heads would never occur ever in a billion years if there were a billion planets each with a billion people each with a billion coins. Now, take into consideration that the human genome has some 2.3 billion base pairs, and a base pair can be one of 4 different combinations. That means that the combination of base-pairs would be 4 to the 2.3 billionth power. That number is about 1x10^1,384,738,000. An insanely large number for sure. Have you ever seen a billion zeros? That's how many zeros that number would have, and then some! So insanely large that the computer program I am using simply cannot compute it. I had to use tricks of exponents to get that number. Obviously, the odds that the DNA pattern in your cells could randomly come about are impossible. But there's more to it than that. For each 3 base pairs code one of 20 proteins. Since there are 4^3 or 64 possible combinations for 3 base pairs, a lot of code can repeat itself and things still work. And takes into consideration how much of your code is redundant, or completely pointless, or repetitive, and the odds get a lot smaller, but are still impossible.
Only by starting small (like with tiny strands of RNA no longer than 30 base pairs long) do the odds become strongly in favor for life. The odds of a 30 pair RNA strand coming about are 4^30 or 1,152,921,504,606,846,976. That number may seem large, but take into consideration that there are 33,444,444,444,444,444,444,444 water molecules in one gram of water. Now imagine that water full of amino acids. There would be at least 334,444,444,444,444,444 amino acids per gram, so the odds now seem very favorable that RNA would assemble randomly. Once we have RNA floating around, we can almost throw out probability altogether since natural selection really kicks in. Of the 1x10^1,384,738,000 combinations of DNA possible in a human, only a tiny fraction of them would actually work at all. Natural selection would kill any non-working combination of genes, so now we're down to maybe 1,000,000,000,000,000 possible working combinations of DNA. That number is really tiny compared to the others I've been dishing out.
So one thing is for sure, a whole strand of DNA couldn't ever assemble randomly and make sense. Only through time and the insane number of molecules in a tiny little gram could life ever form. And once life finally formed out of nothing, the hard part was over. From there, it was all life doing what life does best: beating the odds and surviving. Life truly is magnificent.
[Edited on 10/1/2004 6:30:44 AM]