Ian F. Musgrave, PhD, molecular pharmacologist & Professor of Medical Sciences
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“1) [Creationists] calculate the probability of the formation of a’ modern’ protein, or even a complete bacterium with all ’modern’ proteins, by random events. This is not the abiogenesis theory at all.

“2) They assume that there is a fixed number of proteins, with fixed sequences for each protein, that are required for life.

“3) They calculate the probability of sequential trials, rather than simultaneous trials.

“4) They misunderstand what is meant by a probability calculation.

“5) They seriously underestimate the number of functional enzymes/ribozymes present in a group of random sequences...

“Firstly, the formation of biological polymers from monomers is a function of the laws of chemistry and biochemistry, and these are decidedly not random.

“Secondly, the entire premise is incorrect to start off with, because in modern abiogenesis theories the first ’living things’ would be much simpler, not even a protobacteria, or a preprotobacteria (what Oparin called aprotobiont and Woese calls a progenote), but one or more simple molecules probably not more than 30-40 subunits long. These simple molecules then slowly evolved into more cooperative self-replicating systems, then finally into simple organisms.

“The first ’living things’ could have been a single self replicating molecule, similar to the ’self-replicating’ peptide from the Ghadiri group, or the self replicating hexanucleotide, or possibly an RNA polymerase that acts on itself...

“...Another claim often heard is that there is a ’life sequence' of 400 proteins, and that the amino acid sequences of these proteins cannot be changed, for organisms to be alive.

“This, however, is nonsense. The 400 protein claim seems to come from the protein coding genome of Mycobacterium genetalium, which has the smallest genome currently known of any modern organism. However, inspection of the genome suggests that this could be reduced further to a minimal gene set of 256 proteins. Note again that this is a modern organism. The first protobiont/progenote would have been smaller still, and preceded by even simpler chemical systems.

“As to the claim that the sequences of proteins cannot be changed, again this is nonsense. There are in most proteins regions where almost any amino acid can be substituted, and other regions where conservative substitutions (where charged amino acids can be swapped with other charged amino acids, neutral for other neutral amino acids and hydrophobic amino acids for other hydrophobic amino acids) can be made. Some functionally equivalent molecules can have between 30-50% of their amino acids different. In fact it is possible to substitute structurally non-identical bacterial proteins for yeast proteins, and worm proteins for human proteins, and the organisms live quite happily...

“Yes, one kilogram of the amino acid arginine has 2.85 x 1024 molecules in it (that’s well over a billion billion); a tonne of arginine has 2.85 x 1027 molecules. If you took a semi-trailer load of each amino acid and dumped it into a medium size lake, you would have enough molecules to generate our particular replicator in a few tens of years, given that you can make 55 amino acid long proteins in 1 to 2 weeks...

“...Another misunderstanding is that most people feel that the number of enzymes/ribozymes, let alone the ribozymal RNA polymerases or any form of self-replicator, represent a very unlikely configuration and that the chance of a single enzyme/ribozyme forming, let alone a number of them, from random addition of amino acids/nucleotides is very small.

“However, an analysis by Ekland suggests that in the sequence space of 220 nucleotide long RNA sequences, a staggering 2.5 x 10112sequences are efficent [sic] ligases. Not bad for a compound previously thought to be only structural. Going back to our primitive ocean of 1 x 1024 litres and assuming a nucleotide concentration of 1 x 10-7 M, then there are roughly 1 x 1049 potential nucleotide chains, so that a fair number of efficent [sic] RNA ligases (about 1 x 1034) could be produced in a year, let alone a million years. The potential number of RNA polymerases is high also; about 1 in every 1020 sequences is an RNA polymerase. Similar considerations apply for ribosomal acyl transferases (about1 in every 1015 sequences), and ribozymal nucleotide synthesis.

“Similarly, of the 1 x 10130 possible 100 unit proteins, 3.8 x 1061 represent cytochrome C alone! There’s lots of functional enyzmes [sic] in the peptide/nucleotide search space, so it would seem likely that a functioning ensemble of enzymes could be brewed up in an early Earth’s prebiotic soup.

“So, even with more realistic (if somewhat mind beggaring) figures, random assemblage of amino acids into ’life-supporting’ systems (whether you go for protein enzyme based hypercycles, RNA world systems, or RNA ribozyme-protein enzyme coevolution) would seem to be entirely feasible, even with pessimistic figures for the original monomer concentrations and synthesis times.”

— Ian F. Musgrave, PhD, “Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations,” Talk Origins FAQ, 1998

Paul Davies, PhD, English physicist & professor, 1946-
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“Many people, including some scientists, would like to believe that the cosmic code contains a real message for us from an Encoder. They maintain that the very existence of the code is evidence for the existence of an Encoder, and that the content of the message tells us something about him. Others, such as Pagels, find no evidence for an Encoder at all: ‘One of the odd features of the cosmic code is that, as far as we can tell, the Demiurge has written himself out of the code – an alien message without evidence of an alien.’ So the laws of nature have become a message without a Sender. Pagels is not unduly perturbed by this. ‘Whether God is the message, wrote the message, or whether it wrote itself is unimportant to our lives. We can safely drop the idea of a Demiurge, for there is no scientific evidence for a Creator of the natural world, no evidence for a well or purpose in nature that goes beyond the known laws of nature.’”

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— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p80-81

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Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
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“The argument from improbability is the big one. In the traditional guise of the argument from design, it is easily today’s most popular argument offered in favour of the existence of God and it is seen, by an amazingly large number of theist, as completely and utterly convincing. It is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, unanswerable argument – but in precisely the opposite direction from the theist’s intention. The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.“The name comes from Fred Hoyle’s amusing image of the Boeing 747 and the scrapyard. I am not sure whether Hoyle ever wrote it down himself, but it was attributed to him by his close colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe and is presumably authentic. Hoyle said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. Others have borrowed the metaphor to refer to the later evolution of complex living bodies, where it has a spurious plausibility. The odds against assembling a fully functioning horse, beetle or ostrich by randomly shuffling its parts are up there in 747 territory. This, in a nutshell, is the creationist’s favorite argument – an argument that could be made only by somebody who doesn’t understand the first thing about natural selection: somebody who thinks natural selection is a theory of chance whereas – in the relevant sense of chance – it is the opposite.
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“The creationist misappropriation of the argument from improbability always takes the same general form, and it doesn’t make any difference if the creationist chooses the masquerade in the politically expedient fancy dress of ‘intelligent design’ (ID). Some observed phenomenon – often a living creature or one of its more complex organs, but it could be anything from a molecule up to the universe itself – is correctly extolled as statistically improbable. Sometimes the language of information theory is used: the Darwinian is challenged to explain the source of all the information in living matter, in the technical sense of information content as a measure of improbability or ‘surprise value.’ Or the argument may invoke the economist’s hackneyed motto: there’s no such thing as a free lunch – and Darwinism is accused of trying to get something for nothing. In fact, as I shall show in this chapter, Darwinian natural selection is the only known solution to the otherwise unanswerable riddle of where the information comes from. It turns out to be the God Hypothesis that tries to get something for nothing. God tries to have his free lunch and be it too. However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.”
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— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p137-138