Evolution: Simple Mathematics

Creationists love to insist that evolution had to assemble upward of 300 amino acids in the right order to create just one medium-size human protein. With 20 possible amino acids to occupy each of those positions, there would seemingly have been more than 20300 possibilities to sift through, a quantity that renders the number of atoms in the observable universe inconsequential. Even if we discount redundancies that would make some of those sequences effectively equivalent, it would have been wildly improbable for evolution to have stumbled onto the correct combination through random mutations within even billions of years.

The fatal flaw in their argument is that evolution didn’t just test sequences randomly: The process of natural selection winnowed the field. Moreover, it seems likely that nature somehow also found other shortcuts, ways to narrow down the vast space of possibilities to smaller, explorable subsets more likely to yield useful solutions.

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