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False statement, Brian. Given 4 billion years, proteins have plenty of time to be chaotically and randomly generated to have a function.....or mutated to have a slightly different function, or mutated a bajillion times over millions of generations to have a completely different function. Mutations change the protein's primary, secondary, and/or tertiary structure....changes the protein function for good/bad.

OK, where did the first proteins come from?

is it not true that proteins must be synthesized?

What synthesized them? Where did the mechanism to produce them come from and from what is IT comprised?

ES Given 4 billion years, proteins have plenty of time to be chaotically and randomly generated to have a function.....or mutated to have a slightly different function, or mutated a bajillion times over millions of generations to have a completely different function.

Actually, neither "randomness" nor "combinatorix" are helpful to the evolutionist argument on this point.

betty boop authored an excellent research project concerning the difference between combinatorix and Bayesian probability. Bayesian, not combinatorix, should be used to argue in favor of evolution. She quoted Jewish Physicist Schroeder on this point:

In short, by such methods we seem to get no further along with the question of whether the universe is “informed at its root” or not.

Consider another example: As Gerald Schröeder points out[4], a single typical protein is a chain of 300 amino acids, and there are 20 common amino acids in life; which means that the number of possible combinations that would lead to the actualization of a typical protein would be 20³⁰⁰ or 10³⁹⁰. In this way Combinatorics theory specifies the global problem.

But as Schröeder further describes the problem:

“It would be as if nature reached into a grab bag containing a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion proteins and pulled out the one that worked and then repeated this trick a million million times.”[5]

Combinatorics theory does not seem to shed much light on what we can say about the actual formation of a typical protein — though it tacitly acknowledges that the protein process must begin and unfold in finite time.

Pragmatically, it seems any reliable statement about the origin of proteins requires us to narrow the field from all possibilities to those that are more likely to occur — not least because the people who observe and describe such things are finite themselves.

Likewise, we cannot say something is random in the system when we don't know what the system "is."

A series of numbers blindly pulled from the extension of pi for instance may seem random but is, in fact, highly determined by the calculation of the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter.

Order cannot arise from chaos in an unguided physical system. Period. There are always guides to the system.

Cellular automata and self-organizing complexity have rules. Chaos theory has initial conditions.

An argument in favor of evolution should posit Bayesian probability and specific complex systems theory rather than pure, blind, chance such as Combinatorix. That argument is mathematically untenable.