What Some Scientists Say about Neo Darwinism
What Some Scientists Say
According to most mathematical calculations, a universe 100 billion years old is still not old enough for a simple single cell to have developed on earth. Even attempts to synthesize RNA, an information carrying molecule, in the laboratory have also been unsuccessful. Life has not been explained through chemical origins.
Harold Morowitz, a biophysicist, compared the number of interactions needed to randomly produce a living cell with the number of interactions available since the beginning of the universe. The mathematical probabilities are so small that we ought to see no life at all at this stage of the earth's history. The probability of assembling amino acid building blocks into a functional protein is also too small to consider possible. Random assembly is therefore ruled out of the question.
Fred Hoyle comments, "The current scenario of the origins of life is about as likely as the assembly of a fully functional (Boeing) 747 by a tornado whirling about in a junkyard." The Darwinian theory of evolution fails to predict what we actually currently observe. Schutzenberger, a mathematician writes, "There is a considerable gap in the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and we believe the gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged by the current conception of biology.
Hubert Yuckey, an information theorist, argues that the information needed to begin life could not have developed by chance; he suggests that life be considered a given "quantity," like matter or energy. He and some other mathematicians have challenged evolutionary biologists with the extreme improbability of the origin of life by chance chemical reactions, and of the improbability of the origin of all known species by random mutations. If the real "units of life" are bits of information (that is, the messages coded on DNA rather than the DNA molecule itself), evolutionary biology may take quite a different turn in the future.
A very mathematical "information theory" has been developed to solve problems in storing and transmitting information, as do computers and telecommunication systems. Some scientists are applying information theory to help unravel certain unsolved problems in biology, such as prebiological selection, similar in concept to the biological natural selection of Darwinism. They are also studying the self-organized properties of complex chemical systems, and searching for ways to reduce the minimum complexity needed for life. The goal is to find a sensible plausible theory to explain the origin of life. Nobel Laureate Francis Crick writes, "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have been satisfied to get it going."
ON MATHEMATICAL PROBABILITY: "Life cannot have had a random beginning... The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10 to the 20th) to the 2,000th = 10 to the 40,000th, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup" (Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space [Aldine House, 33 Welbeck Street, London W1M 8LX: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1981]).
