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HYPOTHETICAL OPTIONS. "Either Monod was right, life emerged as a consequence of an event that had almost no chance to occur during the lifetime of the universe, or the emergence of life is not a mere question of the probability of a single event, but a driving force exists—and can thus be discovered—to drive this process through its various stages." https://lnkd.in/dS2NY3q View in LinkedIn

DIRECTING EVOLUTION. "In the past year or so, researchers have discovered that the bacterial system can be harnessed to make precise changes to the DNA of humans, as well as other animals and plants. This means a genome can be edited, much as a writer might change words or fix spelling errors. It allows “customizing the genome of any cell or any species at will." https://lnkd.in/dC-NM-E View in LinkedIn

NUMBING NUMBERS. "If we consider now that a sequence made up of 100 monomers was needed for a ribozyme to have the wide range of activity allowing the polymerization of the four ribonucleotides, the probability of one single sequence would be reduced to 0.6×10(–60) and synthesizing all of them in one molecular unit over 1 billion years would lead to the synthesis of a mass of nucleic acid representing several tens that of the Earth per day." https://lnkd.in/dS2NY3q View in LinkedIn

NUCLEIC ACID PROBABILITY. "The random formation of biopolymeric components, for instance nucleic acids, from their building blocks. The probability of a single sequence of 50 nucleotides among all possibilities corresponds to 1/4(50) ≈ 0.8×10(-30) meaning that the exploration of the complete set of sequences over 1 billion years would require the synthesis of more than 4 ×10(13) different sequences every second." https://lnkd.in/dS2NY3q View in LinkedIn

HIGHLY UNLIKELY EVENT. "A sudden transition in a system from an inanimate state to the living state—defined on the basis of present day living organisms—would constitute a highly unlikely event hardly predictable from physical laws." https://lnkd.in/dS2NY3q View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this brief peek into the topic of the improbability of evolution and the emergence of life. This is a bone that many dogs have chewed in, both within science and within philosophy and beyond, because it is a core issue, central to the whole question of biology. Kicking the can into panspermia, life arising beyond earth, simply delays the core question, it does not do away with it. View in LinkedIn

DATA INCREASE. "Since the genetic information is transformed into phenotypic information in ontogeny, this figure (10(8) bits) must represent the amount of information which corresponds to the improved organization of higher animals as compared to their ancestors 500 million years back." https://lnkd.in/eGfBzxS View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION INCREASE. "If we express this complexity in terms of its improbability, defining the amount of genetic information as the negative logarithm of its probability of occurrence by chance, we may say that genetic information is increased in the course of progressive evolution, guided by natural selection of random mutations." https://lnkd.in/eGfBzxS View in LinkedIn

THE LOGIC. "In the course of evolution, complicated organisms have descended from much simpler ones. Since the instructions to form an organism are contained in the nucleus of its fertilized egg, this means that the genetic constitution has become correspondingly more complex in evolution." https://lnkd.in/eGfBzxS View in LinkedIn

ANALYSIS PARALYSIS. "The scientific method can be paralyzed by problems that require understanding the very improbable occurrences that result from very, very large numbers of throws of the dice." https://lnkd.in/dv77eVE View in LinkedIn