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August 1995

         No. 146 - VIRGIL'S AENEID, BY CHANCE ALONE?
                   by Jean S. Morton, Ph.D.'

The late Dr. A.I. Oparin, Russian biochemist, is primarily responsible for
the modern theories on the origin of life.  He believed that inorganic
substances could come together and spontaneously generate living
matter.  Dr. Oparin's atheistic philosophy did not permit him to entertain
the possibility of a Creator.  He did, however, concede that the complexity
of proteins makes their spontaneous formation highy improbable.  Below
is an evaluation by Dr. Oparin of the complexity of protein structure.

     "To the student of protein structure the spontaneous formation of
     such an atomic arrangement in the protein molecule would seem as
     improbable as would the accidental origin of the text of Virgil's
     "Aeneid" from scattered letter type."'

     In spite of the above statement, Dr. @Oparin strongly maintained that
living matter came into existence by spontaneous generation.  No experi-
mental evidence has yet been obtained which supports spontaneous
generation; only living things can bring forth life.  Scientists have used en-
zymes and portions of DNA in a futile effort to proclaim the creation of
life, but organic substances that have been made experimentally..Iack
many of the qualities of life.

     In order for any protein to be made, its amino acid sequence must be
coded into the DNA template.  If the code were totally dependent upon
chemical and physical laws, as the mechanistic theory of evolution de-
mands, then the amino acid sequence for proteins would have to be a
random distribution.  It is an erroneous assumption to think that matter
can go from a state of inorganic, disorderly arrangement to a state of


     Jean Morton is a biochemist, as well as science writer and teacher.  She
     received her Ph.D. from George Washington University in 1%9, and is a
     member of ICR's Technical Advisory Board.

organic, orderly arrangement to make up the DNA code.  Scientists are
inescapably faced v.,ith the intractable problem of trying to code for sense
instead of nonsense by a purely random process.

     The English version of the "Aeneid' of the Roman poet Virgil consists
of approximately 83,000 words.  If we assume the average word to be five
letters long, the entire text of the famous "Aeneid" would contain 415,000
letters.  In comparison to this, there are an estimated 3,000 different kinds
of protein in the simple one-celled bacterium, Escherichia coli.2

     If we assume that each protein has an average of 100 amino acids, and
that the amino acids will average at least 15 atoms, the total number of
atoms would be as follows:

        3,000 x 100 x 15 = 4,500,000.
This is a very low estimate; hemoglobin alone is known to have 9,512
atoms.3 The following calculations will illustrate the improbability of the
accidental origin of Virgil's "Aeneid."

     Nathan KeyfitZ has estimated that the total number of humans who
have ever lived on earth is 7.8 x 1010 - 10".  Most other estimates are
considerably lower.  As absurd as it may seem, assume that all of the
people who have ever lived on earth are still living, and all of them are
printers, and that each has a box containing all 26 letters of the English
alphabet.  Each of the printers shakes the box of letters and spills one
letter, then returns the letter to the box.  Also assume that any one of the
letters has an equal opportunity of being spilled.  Further assume that this
routine of spilling a letter and returning it to the box continues night and
day for 30 billion years, and that each person spills the letters at the super-
natural rate of 1 trillion (1012) letters per second, (30 billion years or ap-
proximately 1018 seconds is at least six times the standard evolutionary
estimate for the age of the earth).  The calculations for the total number of
letters spilled during this period of time would be as follows:

1011 people X 1012 letters/second x 1018 seconds = 1041 spilled letters.

     How much of the "Aeneid" do you suppose could have been composed
from the 1041 spilled letters? You wdi recall that each of the printers had a
box of 26 letters of the alphabet, and that any one of the 26 letters of the
alphabet could be spilled each time the box was shaken.  This makes 26
possibilities for the first letter that spills.  There would be 26 x 26 = 262
possible combinations for the first two letters spilled, and so on for each
additional letter.  Since 26 = 101.415, then the first 29 letters of "Aeneid"
would have

2629 = (10 1.415)29 = 10 41.035 m 1041 possibilities.

     From these calculations we conclude that the 1041 spilled letters would
be almost enough to try all the possible combinations for the first 29
letters of the poem.  In other words, the world's population working con-
tinuously night and day for 30 billion years, spilling 1 trillion letters per
second would not have spilled quite enough letters to make all the pos-

sible combinations for the first line of the poem.  There are 30 letters plus
punctuation in the first line.  To further illustrate the absurdity of thinking
"Aeneid" could be arranged by random processes, the first three lines of
the poem contain 93 letters.5 This means there are 2693 possibilities for
the letters in the first three lines.  Note the following:

                     93
               2693   (101.415)     10 1.415 x 93 10 131.595  10132.

     This means there are 10132 different ways these three lines could be
formed in the manner previously described.  It should be pointed out that
10132 is far greater than the total number of atomic particles in the entire
universe.  Another way of looking at the problem is to say that if all of the
atomic particles in the universe consisted of letters spilled in the manner
previously described, there would not be enough letters to make all the
possible combinations for the first three lines of "Aeneid."

    One can see at a glance that it is preposterous to think that the
"Aeneid" could be arranged by purely random processes.  However, it
would be far more difficult to arrange by random processes the 4,500,000
atoms comprising the simplest possible protein of the one-celled bac-
terium, Escherichia coli, than it would be to arrange the 415,000 letters of
"Aeneid." The point is, by the time one could make all the possible
combinations of the letters for the first three lines of the poem, he would
have run completely out of all time, space, and matter! The probability of
getting "Aeneid" by random processes fades into absurdity even on the
first line, but the probability of obtaining proteins by random processes
fades into absurdity infinitely compounded!

     In summary: (1) If all the people who have ever lived on earth worked
night and day for 30 billion years, spilling letters at the supernatural rate
of 1 trillion letters per second, they would not have spilled enough letters
to make all the possible combinations of letters for the first line of Virgil's
"Aeneid." (2) The number of letters in "Aineid," and the number of
atoms in the amino acids which compose proteins, make it preposterous
to think that these could have been arranged by random processes.
(3) The fines of "Aeneid" show careful planning and thought, and so it is
vjith living organisms.  They show far more intelligent planning, design
and order.  Design, order, and planning are contrary to all that is known
about random processes.  One can only conclude that spontaneous
generation (or "abiogenesis") is totally untenable as a theory for living
things.

                              BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.   Oparin, A.I. The Origin of Life.  New York: Dover Publications, 1965, p. 133.
2.   Lenninger, Albert L. Biochemistry.  New York: Worth Publications, 1975, p. 6.
3.   Moore, John A., et. at.  Biological Science, An Inquiry Into Lye.  New York: Harcourt,
     Brace and World, Inc., 1963, p. 106.
4.   Reported in: Hardin, Gaff ett and Carl Bajema.  Biology, Its Principles and Implications.
     San Francisco: W.H. Freeman & Co., 1978, p. 111.
5.   Hutchities, R.M. "Aeneid." The Poems of Virgil.  William Benton Publishers, 1952, p. 103.