Sequence and information

I came to work this morning to find that Dallas, a co-worker, reordered my keyboard keys in alphabetical order instead of the US QWERTY sequence.  A little prank that frankly irritated me a little at first (messing with my computer will do that), but as I started putting the keyboard together I started to think about protein assembly and the improbability that amino acids could come together by any natural process involving any amount of randomness whatsoever.




It is not sufficient to have all 26 letters to make words and sentences, or in the case of biology, amino acids to build up proteins, a cell, a buffalo or a human being from the bottom up.  Letters on a keyboard must be properly oriented and ordered in the right sequence to maintain the keyboard's proper functioning, namely to remain intelligible to the user so that correct sentences can be written. Likewise, amino acids must be assembled in the proper sequence to create functioning proteins.



In reconstructing the keyboard I had to be careful to put each key back in its proper slot to keep it functioning properly. If one does not know the order of the keys, pressing on the switch underneath the key and observe the output on the screen will reveal the correct place for each key. Under materialistic conditions there would be no intelligence guiding the process of building a functioning cell.



The odds of me reassembling the keyboard in the proper sequence without prior knowledge of the order and without using this trick is so slim that it is practically inexistent.  Actually, the probability of the reordering of the keys following the US QWERTY sequence by chance is the same as ordering the letters in their alphabetical order, and these guys at have already done the math.

"The probability of getting each letter in its correct position is 1 out of 26 tries, and so it will take (on average) 26 to the 26th power (26²⁶) trials to get the entire alphabet correct (and then natural selection would have something to work on, let's say, like the first life, or a brand new protein). At 100,000 trials per second it should take about:  26²⁶ (trials) / 3,155,760,000,000 (trials/year) = 1,950,756,580,000,000,000,000,000 years!"

In fact you can download their program and let it run to see what you get.  Who knows you could win some cash.  They're offering $1,500 to the first person who gets 15 out of 26 in the correct sequence.



This exercise made reassembling the keyboard actually fun! The price I paid for hiding my co-worker's backpack in the showroom Beetle trunk.