The likelihood of a living cell forming by accident is finite but very remote.

Very. The likelihood of a 747 forming when a whirlwind goes through a junkyard is zero. The living cell is merely remote.

Nuclear physics and cosmologists have identified (I’m told) twenty-plus purely arbitrary numeric values for such things as the masses of various subatomic particles, the strengths of the four primary sources, the ratio of mass to energy that determines the speed of light, and so forth. Jiggle any single on of them and you may not even reach step a) in the sequence in the first paragraph.

Once the universe and time *both* began, the result was merely a matter of time. So many stars that it takes 24-ish decimal digits to number them. Say one in ten-thousand has an “earth” candidate in orbit at the right distance, with a large moon to stabilize it so that seasons stay regular. On each, perhaps N million cubic miles of ocean and a major fraction of a billion years, to wait for that one ultimate serendipity, a cell forming that is capable of reproduction.

Did I mention the way the various chemicals necessary for life tend to leap together like smart LEGOs?

How difficult is it to guess, just a guess, that a GOD created the universe so beautifully designed that it would, on its own and therefore organically*, generate not just life but life capable of perceiving the miracle of its own existence?

To me, if you want a way to discuss Intelligent Design, that’s as far as you need to go.

*love to stick in buzz-words.

That says nothing about humans. There is currently a controversy over how the first cell came about in the first place. Once the cell survives and reproduces, evolution is inevitable and mighty.

The difficulty is getting that first cell to fall into place. Which is why having (guessing) around 10**20 earthlike planets each with a million cubic miles of warm ocean over a span of several hundred million years may be part of the Grand Scheme that produced – – ta daaaa – – us.

Imagination is a wondrous thing; the SETI project grasps at wisps of straw, since our ability to find that kind of signal at the present only works across a fraction of a sliver of our one galaxy, out of a trillion or so.

But thank goodness the Star Wars series didn’t stand on logic.

Human DNA is roughly 2 billion triplets. That is comparable in information density to two thousand beach-read novels of 150,000 words each. Cell division keeps one set of DNA, reads it, and produces a second set for the new cell. Along the way a few dozen triplets get mis-copied.

How bad is that? Spend a lifetime reading the second set of novels, and it should take at least that long. Try to spot the several dozen typos spread across two thousand books.

But wait, there’s more! From your first cell, the fertilized egg, you have become something like a trillion cells—very very rough number, but used for illustrative purposes only. The direct route to a trillion cells requires forty cell divisions. So now, a) no two of your cells have perfectly identical DNA, and b) your two thousand novels in the final half-trillion cells have a few thousand typos each.

Life goes on, and there are miracles in that—and all the fuzziness in cell division also makes evolution unstoppable.

Truth in advertising: the special division that produces two eggs swaps major pieces across chromosomes then doesn’t copy – each resulting cell has a random half of the parent DNA.

All other cell divisions produce two whole cells, including the precursors to eggs and sperm. DNA copying errors not only introduce mild fuzziness, they can actually send one too many chromosomes to one cell and one too few to the other. This is how, for instance, Down Syndrome occurs – TWO chromosome 22’s in egg or sperm, THREE in the child. Other chromosome doublings, and (guessing here, but duh!) one too few of anything means the zygote gets aborted early. XXY and XYY babies, even XXYY in very rare cases, happen the same way. Life is sooooo much more complex than we realize.

Ditto, individual genes can double up, and move. The gene for skin pigmentation SWARMS over virtually every chromosome in individuals from most of Africa. Those whose skin is “blue-black” have the greatest number, while the gene is virtually absent in sunburn-prone Nordic folk. This is why Southerners found it within their imaginative reach to tell just how many African vs how man European great-great-grandparents a child might have, based on how many of those melanin-producing genes came through the process of the half-Dad – half-Mom DNA mixmaster.

Mark Twain even put that circumstance into his novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which a mostly-European “black” nanny swapped her child for her mistress’s child, and raised the all-European boy as “hers” and black, with her own son raised “white.” And this was just at the end of the 19th Century, when his fame allowed him to get away without being lynched for such an infamy. Put me on record as despairing over the humanity of all deluded nincompoops who consider the child of two humans to be less-human based on their great-great-grandparents.

Via basic nucleotide chemistry (stipulate that it exists) DNA is read as, thus consists of, triplets. Each triplet consists of three nucleotides, and each nucleotide can be one of A C G and T. Starting at AAA and going on to AAC AAG AAT ACA ACC ACG ACT AGA AGC AGG AGT (, , whew) by the time you get to TTT you’ve got 64 different combinations. (Do try this at home. 😉 )

Out of those, AUG is a “punctuation” that says “start.” In mid-gene it codes for methionine. All 64 combinations do something. Three—UAA, UAG, UGA—mean “stop.” The other 61 triplets each indicate one of the twenty amino acids that are used in forming a protein. Most of the 20 amino acids have multiple codings. The total string of triplets, from AUG to one of the ‘end’ triplets, is a gene. When activated, that gene is the recipe for a protein. “Activated” means that the gene is read, sequentially, and each amino acid a triplet codes for gets strung onto the developing protein in that order. When the gene transcription process hits a “stop” the protein is complete. At this point the construction machinery releases it to operate in whatever way it happens to work.

Now as to “information not being added to DNA” we have a contradiction in terms. DNA is information. You can surely add DNA to DNA, therefore you can surely “add information to DNA.”

Next time you hear someone distinguished repeat this idea about not being able to add information to DNA, kindly forgive them for wanting to prove the impossible, or at least to prove nonsense.

Forgive me droning on, but here is a factoid you might find intriguing. Human DNA is roughly 6 billion nucleotides long, or 2 billion triplets. The equivalent density of information is 12 billion binary bits; 6 binary bits will cover 26 upper case, 26 lower case, space, period, and the numbers 0 to 9. In short, every triplet is about the same as one letter on a page of print. Now look at two billion letters; that works out to roughly 300 million words, or 2 thousand novels of 150 thousand words each–a decent beach read, two thousand times.

That’s a lot of dead trees! 😉 When a human cell divides, the process of reading out and replicating all 2 billion triplets isn’t perfect. The mechanisms have clever error-check-and-correct capabilities built in, but by the time the second copy of those 2 billion triplets is complete, damage HAS happened. One unsuspected consequence is that no single cell in your body is likely to be have DNA identical to any other single cell! Scary, right? But GOD’s infinite wisdom has seen to it that our bodies keep on keeping on, anyway.

TO CONTINUE THE STORY: look at that second set of 2 thousand novels; a few dozen have one letter on one page that was copied wrong. When you read the two thousand copies, which is an entire lifetime of heavy beach reading, do you think you’ll notice the several dozen typos?

No. You won’t. But the flip side of that coin is that the inevitable small changes that unleash evolution are built in from the ground up. GOD is good, and He made evolution inevitable. He said, “Let there be light.” That was 13.8 billion years ago, and He revealed that fact to us “in the fullness of time” which means that when we read the Psalms now, they tell us to look into the heavens to see GOD’s unguessable majesty and glory, we understand, the universe is vast beyond our ability to understand, and a baker’s-dozen-odd years old.

To insist that GOD only used six thousand years? That diminishes GOD’s majesty and glory, and conflates humanity to a “world” consisting of a planet surrounded by lights. We’re very very much smaller than that: we’re inhabitants of a Universe. “What is man that you are mindful of him?” Indeed, what? GOD made what He made, and did that so that He would have homo sapiens, to love. and (forgive the buzz-word) have homo sapiens organically grown.

Three or four decades ago a sit-com called WKRP in Cincinnati used this tag-line: “Genuine plastic – accept no substitutes.” But GOD don’t make no plastic.

Answer – the oriental potentate variety of “strong man personality” manages to find suckers who have a real weakness for that sort of thing. The potentate has a “gift of gab” that can spin straw lies into gold persuasion.

A personal friend, respected psychologist and family counselor, is afraid that Trump is so deep into his narcissism and sociopathy that he’ll bring the whole country down with him if brought to trial in the Senate, once the House impeaches him. The impeachment is looking stronger with each new day of testimony before three House committees.

Astonishing, truly, that a sizable contingent of Republican lawmakers tried to bum-rush the closed hearing before it took testimony from a former Ambassador to Ukraine. Three hours elapsed before the acting-like-hooligan Trump acolytes left, and the hearing at last took place. They actually tried to ride roughshod over the rules of their own House! Just because the Strong Man Trumped up a phony reason for them to do that.

I think we need to read up on Oriental Potentates and the corner cases of narcissistic sociopathy; we may get insights in how to sail the ship of state past these rocky waters.

That’s 20 to 30 genes per novel, and genes are way way shorter than the information equivalent of 5,000 words (150 thousand divided by 30).

And CRISPER goes after them one at a time.

Not only that, but many genes have multiple roles. Genes adjust and serve multiple non-interacting usages. They get to the point in some awkward, haphazard ways, which is what you might anticipate after half a billion years of trial-and-error with only “it works!” as your guide.

Love the thought, but that level of control is still far far into the future.