CONTRADICTIONS IN HUMAN REASONING

The Challenge of The Qur’an ~ 325 ~ As Fred Hoyle puts it, in The intelligent Universe: Just how excruciatingly slowly genetic information accumulates by trial and error can be seen from a simple example. Let us suppose very conservatively, that a particular protein is coded by a tiny segment in the DNA blueprint, just ten of the chemical links in its double helix. Without all ten links being in the correct sequence, the protein from the DNA doesn’t work. Starting with all the ten wrong, how many generations of copying must elapse before all the links—and hence the protein— come right through random errors? The answer is easily calculated from the rate at which the DNA links are miscopied, a figure which has been established by experiment. “To obtain the correct sequence of ten links by miscopying, the DNA would have to reproduce itself on an average, about a hundred thousand billion times! Even if there were a hundred million members of the species all producing offspring, it would still take million generations before even a single member came up with the required rearrangement. And if that sounds almost within the bounds of possibility, consider what happens if