Did Natural Evolution really have enough Opportunity to Create Life through Random Chance?
One of the arguments that I often hear used against the idea of evolution (the development of a species as it changes from one form to another over a long period of time) is the one that states that if it relied on random chance it wouldn't have been able to happen because the chances of it happening in the time that it took are so darned small.
Absolute rubbish as far as I am concerned, and here's why...
Life appeared on Earth about a billion years after the earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago. Now, how long is a billion years? It's a thousand lots of a million, but even that doesn't really put it into perspective. So let's put it into perspective now.
Let's imagine that time has been sped up, and is now passing 31,536,000 times faster than normal. That's thirty-one and a half million times faster than it is now. Everything has been sped up except for you, who still percieves time normally. How would time pass at this rate?
* At this rate, a year passes in one second.
* The oldest people are born, grow old and die in less than two minutes.
* Australia was settled as a convict settlment less than five minutes ago.
* An entire millenium passes in just over a quarter of an hour.
* Jesus (if he ever existed) lived only half an hour ago.
* Modern man first appeared just two days ago.
* Dinosaurs died out more than two years ago.
* The first reptiles appeared almost eleven years ago.
* Animals first emerged from the water in the form of amphibians almost twelve years ago.
* Plants appeared on land twelve and a half years ago.
* The first multi-celled animals appeared more then twenty one years ago.
* Eukaryotes (the first true plant and animal cells with a nucleus) appeared almost forty six years ago.
* The first bacteria (the first life on this planet) appeared one hundred and twenty years ago.
* The earth was formed almost one hundred and forty three years ago.
* The universe was formed four hundred and seventy five years ago.
So, you can see that a billion years passes very slowly. At this rate, it would take almost thirty two years for a billion years to pass.
Let's do a little thought experiment. Let's go back to the formation of the Earth and try different combinations of amino acids, let's see if we can get the right combination to make the DNA for a simple bacteria (remembering that the earliest bacteria had no organelles). From the formation of earth to the appearance of bacteria is about 700 million years. That's 255,500,000,000 days, or thereabouts. If we tried only one combination a day, we could still try more than 250 trillion combinations. And that's if we just tried one at a time. When we remember that amino acids were combining all over the planet, many different combinations being tried at the same time, the number of possible combinations that can occur gets even higher. If it only occured in four places, the number of different combinations rises to one quadrillion (that's the next one after trillion). If it occured in only one hundred places around the world, the number of possible permutations rises to 25 quadrillion.
Now, given that the scale of these events are absolutely tiny (after all, a DNA strand is microscopic), the chances are that this could have taken place in one hundred different places in a small puddle. That's 25 quadrillion permutations in a small puddle in the time evolution allows us. When we multiply that by the sheer number of puddles that existed all around the world (and lets not forget the oceans as well) there are billions upon billions of possible permutations that could have occured. And that's if we only do one permutation a day at each location. Granted, some permutations would have been done more than once, but that in no way reduces the massive number of different combinations that would have been tried. So, even random chance indicates that somewhere, the right combination would have come about in that billion years that life had to get started.
In short, natural selection and random mutation had plenty of time to get it right, and that's only to form the most basic life forms we know of in the fossil record. It's had three and a half times that time period to get to the life forms we see around us today.
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