i’m re-reading chunks of Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. In chapter 19, ”The Rise of Life’, he points out that collagen – one of many useful proteins for life – needs 1055 amino acids to be organised in exactly the right sequence.

And collagen organises itself spontaneously. There isn’t someone assembling it each time.

“The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil” (p351). Bryson compares it to a poker machine where you have 1055 slots instead of the usual 3-5, where each wheel has 20 different amino acids to choose from. How long would you have to pull the handle of this one-armed bandit? Forever. The odds against winning are 1 in 10^260*.

Not only that, but as well as amino acids forming themselves into proteins, somehow DNA manages to get in on the act – so that the whole thing can reproduce itself – and then there’s a cell membrane to contain all this activity.

Freakishly unlikely.

Fred Hoyle the astronomer once said that it was as if a wind swept through a junkyard, and a fully formed jumbo jet arose by chance (p352).

No wonder the creationists go mad trying to bring their paternalistic version of god into the equation.

Even the Nobel Laureate scientists like Francis Crick (who sorted out the DNA double helix model) have come up with outlandish theories like aliens “deliberately seeding” the earth with life ingredients such as amino acids via meteors and comets.

So we’re incredibly lucky to be living on earth..

Then why am i feeling so glum?

Better get active. Do the dishes. Find a costume for the Chinese new year dinner party. Get off the couch. Start spontaneously re-assembling myself. etc.

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(* 10^260 means 10 with 260 zeroes, and it’s more than the number of atoms in the known universe. That’s big.)

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Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, Black Swan edn 2004.

Bryson’s book is such a great read. You find out all sorts of things, for example the universe is 13 billion years old, and the earth is around 4 billion years old, and life on earth actually started around the 3.85 billion years ago mark..

..and in 1946 Reginald Sprigg discovered pre-Cambrian fossils in the Flinders Ranges, but nobody paid any attention because.. i don’t know, maybe it was his name.

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photo credit: Steve took it,

photo credit: 8#X

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