Thoughts on the Current Condition of Darwin's Evolutionary Hypothesis

Charles Darwin published his most famous work, "On the Origin of the Species" on November 24, 1859.  In the decades that followed, it became foundation of evolutionary biology.  Though it did not attempt to explain abiogenesis, the origin of the first living thing, this work, and his companion work, "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" has served for over one hundred and fifty years as the basis for the most comprehensive naturalist (without consideration of an outside creator) hypothesis for explaining biodiversity.

As a creationist, I do not have a problem with the way this unfolded.  While the naturalist rarely admits to it, they approach observational data with a bias.  They seek to fit their findings of the workings of the universe to a model that explains what we see without interference from a god.  Creationists are biased as well, and I admit that.  We seek to fit the same data to our concept of a universe that is much younger, and which God spoke into existence with biodiversity already as complex as what we see now, if not more so.  It is fine for both sides of the debate to approach with their biases as long as we admit those biases, and as long as data drives our conclusions.

That is where the modern naturalist, the subscriber to Darwin's hypotheses, has a significant problem.  Darwinism suffered a mortal wound in 1952 when Francis Crick and James Watson published their findings on the structure of the DNA molecule.  It was revealed that the complete recipe for a particular human being, or any other living thing, was contained in code made up of a series of base pairs put together in a double helix, the shape of a spiral staircase.  The reason that was the mortal wound for the Evolutionary Hypothesis is that soon, it would be known just how many pieces there are to that code.  By 2003, findings of the Human Genome Project showed that the number of base pairs in the recipe for one human being is approximately 3.1 billion.  Not all of those base pairs code for specific molecules a body will make.  Some of them serve other purposes like controlling the shape of the DNA during cell division, but all of it is necessary to the activity of the information needed to generate one human being.

Now, not all of us have the same exact order to our 3.1 billion base pairs.  A single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) is a place along the code where different people within a population might have a different base pair, or step on the spiral staircase, or character in the code, than others in the same population.  As of October 16, 2014, just over 100 million SNPs had been found in human beings, leaving almost exactly 3 billion base pairs, that have to be just in place for the recipe of a human to be accurate.  Diseases like sickle-cell anemia are caused by having just one of those base-pairs out of place.

If Watson and Crick were the mortal wound for Darwinism, the Human Genome Project was its dying breath.  The recipe, the code, for a human being is 3 billion characters long, using an alphabet that has four characters (rather than the 26 in our writing alphabet).  But if the human genome was assembled by chance errors in DNA replication over the course of billions of years, we have to ask the question, what is the probability that the necessary order of the 3 billion non-SNP base pairs would be achieved?  It is a fairly simple calculation.  With four possibilities at each site, and 3 billion sites, the odds are one in four to the 3 billionth power.  Since we usually give very small probabilities in terms of exponents of 10, we can convert that number to one in ten to the 1.8 billionth power (10^1,800,000,000).

To put the magnitude of this number in perspective, the number of atoms in a spec of dust is 10^16.  There are about 10^25 atoms in a glass of water, and there are 10^80 atoms in the entire universe (exponents scale up quickly).  If the universe is 13.8 billion years old as current evolutionary hypotheses state, less than 10^18 seconds have passed since the beginning of the universe.  Given all of the atoms in the universe and all of the time that is alleged to have passed, it is still mathematically ridiculous to consider the probabilities necessary for the recipe of a human to assemble, and that is even once the base pairs themselves and the machinery to assemble them are already assumed to be in place.

As I said earlier, I do not fault the atheist and the agnostic for wanting to fit the observable data into a model of the universe that ignores the need for a creator, but if they want to continue to do so, Darwinian Evolution in its current form no longer fits the data available to us, nor does any model that requires 3 billion bits of information to be assembled by random errors.