The Science Behind Creation: No Luck Involved

How does an embryo know how to develop into its final form, building each complex organ and system? The answer lies within the nucleus of living cells, in the form of DNA.

DNA: The Blueprint of Life

Every cell in our body contains hereditary material in the form of DNA, which functions like a library of detailed instructions for building organs and cells. Human DNA contains three billion nucleotides, which can be thought of as letters. To write all the information in the human genome, a stack of 2,000 books would be required, reaching a height of 60 meters and containing a million pages altogether.

A vast library of genetic information is folded within a tiny spiral inside the nucleus of the cell, yet the nucleus does not exceed five micrometers in size. To put that in perspective, the nucleus is seventeen times smaller than the dot at the end of this sentence.

Complexity Beyond Humans

The immense complexity of life is not limited to the human body. Even a simple bacterium like Escherichia coli contains about three million nucleotides. Biophysicist Dr. Harold Morowitz calculated that for a single bacterium, it would require a timespan far longer than the age of the universe if the only driving force for its creation were random combinations of molecules.

Most people underestimate just how unlikely random matching is. For illustration, consider the chance of shuffling a standard deck of 52 cards into the correct order. The number of possible arrangements is astronomical: 80 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. In numbers, that is: 80,658,175,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. The probability of a random match is just one in that immense number.

While the universe is estimated to be 13 billion years old, that number is tiny compared to the probability of arranging 52 successful genes correctly, let alone the three billion genes in human DNA.

Life Beyond Luck

It has been found that belief in luck cannot account for the immense complexity of the living cell, animal life, and the human body. Chemist Dr. Roland F. Hirsch wrote: "Life, as revealed to us by new technologies, is more complex than the Darwinian perspective predicted. Modern science allows a scientifically aware individual to be skeptical about Darwinian theories."

Science continues to explore the wonders of life, gradually approaching what Hashem revealed to humanity thousands of years ago at Mount Sinai: "And G‑d said: Let the earth bring forth living creatures of its kind, cattle and creeping things, and beasts of the earth of their kind, and it was so. And G‑d made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground after its kind... and G‑d created man" (Genesis 1:24-27). Hashem created everything with wisdom that knows no bounds, and science continues to move closer to this knowledge from generation to generation.