The Qur’an An Abiding Wonder
The Qur’an: The Book of God
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process would have taken much too long for them
to have happened during the human lifespan of the
world.
As Fred Hoyle puts it, in
The Intelligent Universe:
Just how excruciatingly slowly genetic information
accumulates by trial and error can be seen from a
simple example. Suppose, very conservatively, that
a particular protein is coded by a tiny segment in
the DNA blueprint, just ten of the chemical links in
its double helix. Without all ten links being in the
correct sequence, the protein from the DNA doesn’t
work. Starting with all the ten wrong, how many
generations of copying must elapse before all the
links – and hence the protein – come right through
random errors? The answer is easily calculated from
the rate at which DNA links are miscopied, a figure
which has been established by experiment.
‘To obtain the correct sequence of ten links, by
miscopying, the DNA would have to reproduce
itself on an average, about a hundred million
members of the species all producing offspring, it
would still take a million generations before even a
single member came up with the required
