Protein Folds are Tiny Islands in a Vast Ocean
Why Douglas Axe's work is so important
This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book.
Proteins are large molecules that the nanomachines[i] inside each cell make from amino acids. The sequence of amino acids in a protein folds up to form a very complex three-dimensional structure. That structure can take on many different shapes. There are 20 standard amino acids, so for any given chain, the number of possible combinations is 20 raised to the power of the number of acids in the chain. For example, a protein consisting of a sequence of 153 amino acids has 20153 possible combinations of acids, an astronomically large number. Here is the important thing to keep in mind: Of all those possible combinations, almost all of them are nonfunctional.
Derek Muller at the YouTube channel Veritasium has an excellent video with animations showing how this works.[ii] Of particular relevance to the topic at hand, Muller reports on the enormous complexity of the process. According to calculations by MIT biologist Cyrus Levinthal, even a very short chain folds an astronomical number of ways. Levinthal calculated that if a computer were to check 30,000 configurations of the chain every nanosecond (one billionth of a second), it would take 200 times the age of the universe to find the correct structure for the protein fold.[iii]
Douglas Axe, a professor of molecular biology at Biola University, has done important work on these proteins.[iv] Axe did his work on one of the domains making up an enzyme called beta-lactamase, a sequence that is 153 amino acids long, which is a relatively short sequence. Axe’s goal was to calculate the probability of evolution stumbling upon one of the very few functional amino acid sequences through random chance. His findings were startling. “Of the possible genes encoding protein chains 153 amino acids in length, only about one in a hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion is expected to encode a chain that folds well enough to perform a biological function!”[v] In a vast ocean of combinatorial space consisting of “all sequences of 153 acids” there is a microscopic island called “functional sequences.” Unsurprisingly, Axe made a design inference. It is far more likely that a functional protein fold results from an act of an intelligent agent than from random chance.
[i] Yes, “nanomachines.” I know. Don’t get me started. By the way, “nanomachine” is not my word; that is what materialist scientists call them. See, e.g., Nick Lane and Joana C. Xavier, “To unravel the origin of life, treat findings as pieces of a bigger puzzle,” Nature (Feb. 29, 2024), Vol. 628, 948-951, at 948. The level of willful blindness it requires for materialists not to see the glaring light shining in their faces is truly astounding. There is none so blind as he who will not see. If you want to see a video of these machines at work, go to Veritasium, Your Body's Molecular Machines (Nov. 20, 2017), available at
(accessed January 8, 2025).
[ii] Derek Muller, “What if all the world's biggest problems have the same solution?,” Veritasium (February 10, 2025), available at
(accessed February 12, 2010).
[iii] Id.
[iv] Axe discusses his findings in his book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed.
[v] Axe, Undeniable, 181.
[vi] Dembski and Ewert, The Design Inference, 374.