a

. Carl Sagan showed, using straightforward calculations, why one cell’s worth of genetic information approximates 4,000 books of printed information. Each of Sagan’s 4,000 books had 500 pages with 300 words per page. [See Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 25.]

Each book would have a volume of about 50 cubic inches. An adult human’s body contains about 10¹⁴ cells. About 800 cubic miles have been eroded from the Grand Canyon. Therefore, we can say that if every cell in one person’s body were reduced to 4,000 books, they would fill the Grand Canyon 98 times.

The Moon is 240,000 miles from Earth. If the DNA in a human cell were stretched out and connected, it would be more than 7 feet long. If all the DNA in one person’s body were placed end-to-end, it would extend to the Moon 552,000 times.

The DNA in a human cell weighs 6.4 × 10^-12 grams. [See Monroe W. Strickberger, Genetics, 2nd edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1976), p. 54.] Probably less than 50 billion people have lived on earth. If so, one copy of the DNA of every human who ever lived—enough to define the physical characteristics of all those people in microscopic detail—would weigh only

6.4 × 10^-12 × 50 × 10⁹  =  0.32 grams

This is less than the weight of one aspirin.

“... there is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over. ... There is enough storage capacity in the DNA of a single lily seed or a single salamander sperm to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica 60 times over. Some species of the unjustly called ‘primitive’ amoebas have as much information in their DNA as 1,000 Encyclopaedia Britannicas.”  Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, pp. 116–117.

b

. “Biochemical systems are exceedingly complex, so much so that the chance of their being formed through random shufflings of simple organic molecules is exceedingly minute, to a point indeed where it is insensibly different from zero.” Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, p. 3.

“No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole observable universe is not large enough to contain the necessary monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly the waste paper baskets required for the deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living material.”  Ibid., p. 148.

“From the beginning of this book we have emphasized the enormous information content of even the simplest living systems. The information cannot in our view be generated by what are often called ‘natural’ processes, as for instance through meteorological and chemical processes occurring at the surface of a lifeless planet. As well as a suitable physical and chemical environment, a large initial store of information was also needed. We have argued that the requisite information came from an ‘intelligence’, the beckoning spectre.”  Ibid., p. 150.

“Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make the random concept absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favourable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate.”  Ibid., p. 141.

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe go on to say that our own intelligences must reflect some sort of vastly superior intelligence, “even to the extreme idealized limit of God.” They believe that life was created by some intelligence somewhere in outer space and later was transported to Earth. [emphasis in original]  Ibid., p. 144.

“All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase it.” Lee Spetner, Not by Chance (Brooklyn, New York: The Judaica Press, Inc., 1996), p. 138.

c

. Murray Eden, as reported in “Heresy in the Halls of Biology: Mathematicians Question Darwinism,” Scientific Research, November 1967, p. 64.

“It is our contention that if ‘random’ is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.” Murray Eden, “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory,” Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, editors Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, June 1967, p. 109.

d

. “The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10²⁰)^2,000 = 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth [by chance or natural processes], this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court.”  Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, p. 24.

“Any theory with a probability of being correct that is larger than one part in 10^40,000 must be judged superior to random shuffling [of evolution]. The theory that life was assembled by an intelligence has, we believe, a probability vastly higher than one part in 10^40,000 of being the correct explanation of the many curious facts discussed in preceding chapters. Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.”  Ibid., p. 130.

After explaining the above to a scientific symposium, Hoyle said that evolution was comparable with the chance that “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.” Fred Hoyle, “Hoyle on Evolution,” Nature, Vol. 294, 12 November 1981, p. 105.

e

. “The failure to recognize the importance of introns [so-called junk DNA] may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.” John S. Mattick, as quoted by W. Wayt Gibbs, “The Unseen Genome: Gems among the Junk,” Scientific American, Vol. 289, November 2003, pp. 49–50.

“What was damned as junk because it was not understood may, in fact, turn out to be the very basis of human complexity.”  Ibid., p. 52.

“Noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) [so-called junk RNA] have been found to have roles in a great variety of processes, including transcription regulation, chromosome replication, RNA processing and modification, messenger RNA stability and translation, and even protein degradation and translocation. Recent studies indicate that ncRNAs are far more abundant and important than initially imagined.” Gisela Storz, “An Expanding Universe of Noncoding RNAs,” Science, Vol. 296, 17 May 2002, p. 1260.

“The term ‘junk DNA’ is a reflection of our ignorance.”  Gretchen Vogel, “Why Sequence the Junk?” Science, Vol. 291, 16 February 2001, p. 1184.

“... non-gene sequences [what evolutionists called ‘junk DNA’] have regulatory roles.” John M. Greally, “Encyclopaedia of Humble DNA,” Nature, Vol. 447, 14 June 2007, p. 782.