Researchers used Moore's Law to conclude that life has not had enough time to evolve on Earth. Image courtesy of NASA.
Joel Kontinen
Life is far too complicated to have evolved on Earth through purely natural processes, a recent paper suggests.
According to an article posted on the Phys.org website,
“Geneticists Richard Gordon of the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida and Alexei Sharov of the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore have proposed, in a paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, that if the evolution of life follows Moore's Law, then it predates the existence of planet Earth.”
Moore's Law states that the number of components in integrated circuits doubles every two years, and thus computers become exponentially more complex and effective over time.
Gordon and Sharov apply Moore's Law to biological complexity. They work backwards from the present, assuming that genetic complexity doubles every 376 million years.
They conclude that given the current complexity of life, the first life had to appear almost 10 billion years ago, which exceeds the prevailing naturalistic estimate of the age of Earth by over five billion years.
What the research failed to consider is that life could never have risen spontaneously in any time. Life only comes from life.
Source:
Yirka, Bob. 2013. Researchers use Moore's Law to calculate that life began before Earth existed. Phys.org (18 April).
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