For the previous installments: part 1, 2, 3.
Chapter 9
In the early 1960s, MIT professor Murray Eden set his mind to discover whether neo-Darwinism could account for the origin of new organisms. He knew life was based on a genetic code, and based on our shared experience of all other coded systems, he assumed the sequence of nucleotides was absolutely critical to its function. If you start adding, deleting, or moving pieces of a digital code, for example, the meaning (function) is degraded or even lost. If we can’t create a better program by randomly adding, deleting, and moving pieces of digital code, why think a Darwinian process that makes random changes to the DNA code could build better and novel organisms (indeed, why think a coded system could ever be built by random processes to begin with)?
In 1966, Eden and other colleagues convened a conference at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. The conference was titled “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution.” The conference sought to explore the creative power of natural selection acting on random mutations. Those present recognized that there are an enormous number of ways to combine amino acids together to form protein chains. And while they did not know precisely how many combinations could result in a functional protein compared to those that could not, they did know the number of functional combinations was extremely small.
Thinking to Believe 