Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

The Marriage of Science and Religion 203
molecular structure follows simply from thus and such a set of chemical
laws, but more often than not they can only say, “If it were structured
otherwise it would die.” There is good reason to believe that living things
are actually far more complex—far more “improbable”—than English
novels, let alone English sentences. Of course, we do know that all of human
complexity is somehow encoded in our chromosomes: in the sequences
of four different nucleotides that make up our DNA. Human
DNA is composed of more than three billion pairs of nucleotides. Some
DNA provides a code for the construction of proteins, some seems to have
a little understood regulatory function, and some may have no coding
function at all. Even if we figure conservatively and assume that only
one-twenty-fifth of the DNA is significant, the number of possible combinations
of just that “significant” DNA is four to the power of one hundred
twenty million. That is approximately ten to the power of seventytwo
million. When the estimated number of atoms in the universe is
“only” 10 70 one can appreciate how unimaginably huge such a number
really is.
This gives some idea why Darwinists are so careful to specify the gradual
accumulation of small changes. Large leaps, involving sizable amounts
of information, quickly become prohibitively improbable if chance alone
is operating. Unfortunately for the Darwinists, many of the transformations
required by the theory of evolution seem to demand such wholesale
changes. That is because a single individual trait is typically part of a larger
integrated system and a change in one part cannot be functional without
changes in many other parts of the system. Look again at the sentence in
the example on page 201. What if we tried to gradually transform this
simple sentence (infinitely simple compared with even a bacterium) into
another sentence? Each change must produce a functional whole: the sentence
must be “fit to survive.” Considered in isolation, short words present
little problem because there are relatively few possible combinations of
two or three letters and a large number of them are actual English words.
“In” could become “an” or “it,” and “the” could be transformed into “she”
or “tie.” Unfortunately, such changes would not improve the meaning of
the sentence: they would not be “fit.” And what about the word “beginning,”
the only word over four letters long in the sentence? How many
reputable English words could be made by changing just one letter? The
only one apparently is beginnings, which does not get one very far. Most
long words, as well as nearly all sentences, are “isolated”—they either cannot
be modified into anything else meaningful in a single unitary step, or