Biogenesis

They had come to this conclusion because of their determination of the statistical improbabilities of the single cell originating in the primitive atmosphere in the assumed 4.6 billion years of earth's history. According to their calculations, the probability of life originating by random processes was one change in 10⁴⁰⁰⁰⁰. -- Hoyle and Wickramasinghe

As the Encyclopedia Britannica says, "the information content of a simple cell has been estimated at around 10 ¹² bits. This is the amount of data estimated to be contained in the DNA molecule of E. coli, the bacteria in our intestines that help digest our food.

"The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it.. It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence."

"But the most sweeping evolutionary questions at the level of biochemical genetics are still unanswered ... The fact that in all organisms living today the processes both of replication of the DNA and of the effective translation of its code require highly precise enzymes and that, at the same time, the molecular structures of those same enzymes are precisely specified by the DNA itself, poses a remarkable evolutionary mystery."

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