$2,000 in prize money has already been awarded! And now there's another $2,000 being offered right here at KGOV.com on this Evolve page!
Can life begin by chance? When an evolutionist claims that natural selection explains the origin of life, he's left out an enormous prerequisite. Natural selection can't select until there is something for it to select. That's true for the start of life, and for any new proteins to evolve. At KGOV.com, we find the following statement almost universally ignored by evolutionists: Natural selection cannot select something until it exists.
And by Darwinian naturalism, whatever is to be preserved must first come into existence by either random mutation or chance chemical reactions. Therefore, probability is directly relevant to the feasibility of evolution, although Darwinists widely ignore this mathematical discipline. So, can life (or even one of the countless unique proteins) evolve by chance? Remember, before natural selection can preserve them, THEY FIRST MUST COME INTO EXISTENCE!
So, let's start with a far easier question, to help us comprehend this enormous difficulty: Let's give the evolutionist their claimed fifteen billion years of the universe, and see if a random number generator can get the 26-letter English alphabet in order by chance. This is a parallel to Life Beginning, or random mutations producing a Brand New Protein, (which natural selection could then propagate).
To demonstrate this challenge, one of the world's premiere software engineers (you probably have used his software without knowing it) from Boulder, Colorado developed a program for us, called Evolve.exe. So far, we have run more than 60 trillion iterations, and our best result so far has been getting fifteen letters in their correct position.
If you run this program (we've run it for years ), you'll get a feel for the harsh reality of probabilities. How long will it take to get all 26 letters correct?
One year contains about 31,557,600 seconds. If your PC runs Evolve at 100,000 trials per second, you'll see 3,155,760,000,000 iterations in one year, i.e., 3.16 trillion trials per year. The probability of getting each letter in its correct position is 1 out of 26 tries, and so it will take (on average) 26 to the 26th power (26^26) trials to get the entire alphabet correct (and then natural selection would have something to work on, let's say, like the first life, or a brand new protein). At 100,000 trials per second it should take about: 26^26 (trials) / 3,155,760,000,000 (trials/year) = 1,950,756,580,000,000,000,000,000 years!
That's 1.95 septillion years! That's to get just 26 variables in the correct order, which would represent an absurdly simplified protein. And evolutionists claim the entire universe is only about 15,000,000,000 (15 billion) years old. We're missing a serious number of zeroes here for feasible alphabet evolution.
Just imagine for the actual evolution of life, if after a septillion-trillion years, a single protein molecule formed in nature, and then nature, being its brutal self, simply destroyed it. For example, as NASA's senior astrobiologist Mary Voytez admitted in answering our question, if water was around, being the universal solvent, the water would dissolve the protein! What a waste of time!
Let's have one billion people run the KGOV Evolve program in parallel (averaging 100,000 trials/second), then it will only take about 1,950,756,580,000,000 years = 1.95 quadrillion years, still far longer than the entire supposed age of the universe, and you'd still only have a 26-letter alphabet, which is nothing as compared to the complexity of a simple protein!
So, here is the sentence that most evolutionists we debate refuse to acknowledge: Natural selection cannot work until it has something to select! Thus the probability is wildly unachievable in our universe for random chemical reactions to produce the first life, or for mutation to produce a brand new protein.
Your PC can help us demonstrate the significance of probability regarding evolution. Download Evolve.exe and make a few billion attempts at getting the alphabet in order, by random chance. In the 1990s, we awarded $500 to the first person who got 14 letters in their correct positions, and in 2010 we awarded $1,500 to the first person who got 15 letters correct, and now click on this link to see the current $2,000 prize offer...
Yes, we want to pay you $2,000 if you are the first person to get 16 letters correct running evolve. So please, download evolve and give evolution a try!
© 2011 Bob Enyart Live You may want to listen to KGOV's infamous 73-second excerpt of Bob Enyart debating with Scientific American editor Michael Shermer, or listen to the whole show. Also, you may enjoy reading Bob's 170-page, 10-round moderated debate titled Does God Exist?
And Check Out These Special Editions of Real Science Radio:
- BEL's famous List of Not-So-Old Things
- Bob's debate with Christian Darwinist British author James Hannam
- PZ Myers blogs against Real Science Radio so Bob hits back with the Trochlea Challenge
- Waiting for Darwin's Other Shoe: Evolution mag's cover story Darwin Was Wrong on the Tree of Life
- Microbiologist in Studio: Bob talks with the Creation Research Society Quarterly editor about new genetic findings
- Caterpillar Kills Atheism: describe how a bug could evolve to liquefy itself and then build itself into a flying creature