Search spaces, or how many needles in the haystack?
So I’ve shown that generating a given small enzyme is not as mind-bogglingly difficult as creationists (and Fred Hoyle) suggest. Another misunderstanding is that most people feel that the number of enzymes/ribozymes, let alone the ribozymal RNA polymerases or any form of self-replicator, represent a very unlikely configuration and that the chance of a single enzyme/ribozyme forming, let alone a number of them, from random addition of amino acids/nucleotides is very small. However, an analysis by Ekland suggests that in the sequence space of 220 nucleotide long RNA sequences, a staggering 2.5 x 10112 sequences are efficent ligases [12]. Not bad for a compound previously thought to be only structural. Going back to our primitive ocean of 1 x 1024 litres and assuming a nucleotide concentration of 1 x 10-7 M [23], then there are roughly 1 x 1049 potential nucleotide chains, so that a fair number of efficent RNA ligases (about 1 x 1034) could be produced in a year, let alone a million years
