SCT: How Creative Is Randomness?

Scientists tried arranging
amino acids at random
to see what emerged

This article first appeared in Science & Culture Today.

Testing the Creativity of Randomness
by David Coppedge
Science & Culture Today, September 15, 2026

Can random sequences of an alphabet convey meaning? Can random sequences of amino acids perform a function? A new study tested a subset of random sets of amino acids expanded with tandem duplications. The results were sometimes surprising but posed no threat to intelligent design.

Douglas Axe’s groundbreaking work into the dark matter of protein conformational space in 2004 strongly suggested that functional space represents a vanishingly small fraction of sequence space.¹ He mutated a beta lactamase enzyme to the point where it would no longer fold into its functional structure and estimated that the ratio of any functional protein that folds correctly to random sequences of 150 amino acids was roughly 1 in 10⁷⁴. This implies that the vast field of possible sequences represents useless dark matter, comparable to strings of random letters happening, on extremely rare occasions, to spell meaningful words or sentences. The longer the meaningful sequence, the more improbable it becomes, exponentially.²

Evolutionary scientists recognize this needle-in-a-haystack problem. In PNAS, a team of researchers from UC San Francisco along with colleagues at Brandeis University state,

Proteins are molecular machines that rely on well-defined tertiary structures to carry out many of their remarkable functions. The molecular mechanisms by which proteins evolved their modern-day sequences and structures have been a puzzle for decades. Early studies focused on the astronomical number of possible sequences for even a 100-residue protein there are 20¹⁰⁰ possible permutations for a sequence of this length composed of the 20 standard amino acids.

Could the complex molecules required for life emerge spontaneously by chance? Credit: Illustra Media, Origin.

That’s equivalent to 1.3 x 10¹³⁰ trials evolution would have to search through to locate functional protein folds. To get around this formidable challenge to unguided chemical evolution, the authors speculate that proteins may have evolved from shorter peptides with simple folds. They also point out that multiple sequences could arrive at the same fold; they define this as “designability.” Their paper is titled, “The emergence of novel versus known three-dimensional structures from random sequences.”

To make the search for functional polypeptides within the vast arena of sequence space more tractable, they consider the possibility that tandem repeats of polypeptides would be more amenable to folding….

Click here to continue reading.

See also our online book, Evolution: Possible or Impossible? [read Anecdote below].

See probability animation by Illustra Media, First Life, based on the above book.

Anecdote: In a post on Science & Culture Today (25 Sept 2026), Dr William Dembski, a key intellectual leader of the intelligent design movement with many books to his credit, tells the story of how he began to be interested in the subject of information. A key turning point was reading a little paperback book by John Weldon and Clifford Wilson, published in 1978, that contained a 3-page appendix calculating the probability of one biomolecule evolving by chance—a probability so ridiculously low, it was obvious it would never happen. Dembski wrote,

One thing in particular that I read convinced me a naturalistic origin of life was all washed up. It was short. It was the appendix of a book that’s still somewhere on my shelf. I read it in 1980. I was a junior at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle (subsequently renamed University of Illinois at Chicago) doing a psychology undergrad. A student I met in class and at a weekly Campus Crusade meeting recommended a book titled Close Encounters: A Better Explanation, by Clifford Wilson and John Weldon.

As in our day, UFOs and extraterrestrials had back then captured the public imagination (through such films as Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Yet in the appendix to that book, for whatever reason, there was a mathematical argument against life originating by undirected means, which is to say apart from intelligence. The odds were just too much against it. The argument in that book was probabilistic and it irrevocably shifted my thinking, leading me ever after to think it absurd that the chemical constituents of life could organize themselves spontaneously into life.

Once I had that conviction, the naturalistic blinders were off and the question then arose where else naturalism failed. [Bold added.]

I looked at that appendix just now and found that a key source the authors used was Evolution: Possible or Impossible? by my father, Dr James F. Coppedge (see link above for the full text online, free). Weldon and Wilson cited his book by name (see their Ref. 3). The appendix summarized my father’s famous “case of the traveling ameba” and mentioned that they even contacted my father personally to check the calculation. [Note: I have the last print copies of the book in mint condition; contact editor@crev.info if interested in obtaining one.]

This means Weldon and Wilson were influenced by my father’s book, and by citing it, they in turn influenced Bill Dembski’s thinking at a key point in his college life. His subsequent prodigious work into information, probability, philosophy and the design inference was launched by that short appendix in a small paperback book in 1980 that remains on his shelf to this day. That turning point led directly to his best known life’s work arguing at a high academic level against materialism and supporting the validity of design by an intelligent Creator.

It is gratifying to see another example of the influence of my father’s writing, that it contributed to motivating one of the most intellectually gifted proponents of intelligent design to begin his 46-year journey of thinking, writing, speaking, debating, and influencing the world to see the absurdity of chance and the scientific validity of The Design Inference.