Design Crashes the LUCA Party

Looks like the whole
party was intelligently
designed from the start

 

Design Crashes the LUCA Party

by Ronald Fritz, PhD

LUCA is short for “Last Universal Common Ancestor” — the hypothetical organism that evolutionary theory claims is the great-great-grandparent of every living thing on Earth today.

A brand-new research paper¹ has just dropped a bombshell on that story.

Descent from a common ancestor restricts exploration of protein sequence space. (Isakova et al., PNAS, 2026). The study, summarized in a news brief from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology titled “Identifying the Limits of Protein Evolution,”² shows that proteins — the tiny molecular machines that do almost all the real work in cells — have barely changed in the supposed four billion years since LUCA.

Are natural protein sequences representative of all possible sequences that are functional? The sequence space is immense but proteins have been evolving for billions of years, so much of the possible functional space may have already been explored. We find that because sequence evolution of homologous proteins starts from a single common ancestor, protein sequence diversity has been limited to an extreme degree and even 4 billion years of evolution was insufficient to explore the functional sequence space. Protein engineering models that learn only from natural protein sequences may be limited in their ability to predict sequences outside the explored sequence space and empirical approaches that explore the unnatural sequence space may be necessary to fully realize their potential.

The Point of Origin Brake

Instead of evolving wildly, this paper indicates, each protein family has explored only a ridiculously tiny slice of all possible sequences. One group of bacteria, for example, barely touched one part in 10⁶⁴ of the available functional space. That’s not “some evolution.” That’s almost nothing.

The researchers discovered that the biggest brake on protein change isn’t natural selection or bad mutations — it’s the starting point itself. They call it a “point of origin” effect. Once a protein family got started, it pretty much stayed put.

An Impossible Leap

Here’s the resulting problem for the standard evolutionary story: LUCA didn’t show up with just a handful of simple proteins. It already had around 2,600 different functional proteins — a surprisingly complex toolkit for metabolism, protein-making machinery, DNA copying, and more.

That means thousands of sophisticated, folded, working proteins had to be ready and running before LUCA existed — and before natural selection had a chance to do any selecting.

In other words, 2,600 functional protein sequences gate-crashed the LUCA party long before natural selection even got an invitation.

This makes the origin-of-life problem far worse for unguided evolution. Post-LUCA evolution has now been shown to be heavily constrained, so most of LUCA’s protein diversity had to appear independently in a geologically short window before full cellular life and Darwinian processes were up and running.

The Devil’s in the Dice

Proteins in LUCA averaged about 300 amino acids long. Stephen Meyer, drawing on Douglas Axe’s experimental work, calculated roughly 1 in 10³⁷ odds for getting one new functional 150-amino-acid protein fold by unguided stepwise processes (Axe’s measured functional rarity of ~1 in 10⁷⁷ divided by the ~10⁴⁰ mutational trials available in all of Earth’s history)³. Extending that same logic to a 300-amino-acid protein — with its much larger sequence space — gives roughly 1 in 10¹¹⁴ odds for each one.

For all 2,600 of them, the joint probability then becomes:

(1 / 10¹¹⁴)²⁶⁰⁰ = 1 in 10²⁹⁶⁴⁰⁰

To put that in perspective: The observable universe has about 10⁸⁰ electrons. Getting one success in 10²⁹⁶⁴⁰⁰ tries would be like searching 10²⁹⁶³²⁰ more universes exactly like ours just to find one special electron.

Or, using Émile Borel’s “single law of chance,”⁴ any probability smaller than 1 in 10⁵⁰ is considered practically impossible. This LUCA scenario is 10²⁹⁶³⁵⁰ times more remote than Borel’s impossibility threshold.

Time to Give Up on LUCA

Nobel Prize-winning chemist Christian de Duve put it bluntly:

“If you equate the probability of a bacteria cell to chance assembly of its atoms, eternity will not suffice to produce one.”

Yet we’re still told LUCA’s origin is essentially settled science.

Turns out the pre-LUCA protein party was already packed with sophisticated gate-crashers — long before natural selection even made the guest list.

Looks like the whole party was intelligently designed from the start.

References

1. Isakova, L. H., Streltsova, E., Bochkareva, O. O., Vlasov, P. K., & Kondrashov, F. A. (2026). Descent from a common ancestor restricts exploration of protein sequence space. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(14), Article e2532018123. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2532018123
2. Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University. (2026, March 31). Identifying the limits of protein evolution. https://www.oist.jp/news-center/news/2026/3/31/identifying-limits-protein-evolution
3. Meyer, S. C. (2013). Darwin’s doubt: The explosive origin of animal life and the case for intelligent design. HarperOne. (See also Meyer, S. C. (2009). Signature in the cell. HarperOne, pp. 204–220.)
4. Borel, É. (1962). Probability and life (M. Baudin, Trans.). Dover Publications. (Original work published 1943 as Les probabilités et la vie.)

---

Ronald D. Fritz, PhD, is a retired research statistician whose career spanned 27 years. Before entering the field of statistics, he worked as an engineer and engineering manager in the defense industry. He earned his doctorate in Industrial Engineering, with a minor in Mathematical Statistics, from Clemson University, where he was honored as a Dean’s Scholar. Dr. Fritz served as a consulting statistician across a broad range of industries, culminating in a 12-year role as a global statistical resource at PepsiCo. During his time at PepsiCo, he led significant research on gluten contamination in oats and its relationship to celiac disease, publishing several articles on the subject.

In retirement, Dr. Fritz developed a deep interest in creation science, sparked by a visit to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. As he delved into the topic, he shared his findings with his pastor, which led to an invitation to speak at their church. This initial presentation opened the door to further speaking engagements at churches throughout the region. Dr. Fritz has been married for 35 years to his wife, Mitzie. They live in the mountain community of Bee Log, North Carolina, within sight of the church where they were married and now worship. In his free time, Dr. Fritz tends a small chestnut orchard on their property, working to revive what was once a cherished local delicacy. The couple has two adult children.