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Lecomte du Nouy and the Title 'Ninth Configuration'


The title "Ninth Configuration" is a reference to Lecomte du Nouy's term for the asymmetry of amino acids (a French physical chemist turned theologian and philosopher). It is now known that (almost) all amino acids in the proteins of living organisms are of the right chirality. In du Nouy's book "Human Destiny," he refers to a 9/10 fraction of amino acids in protein being of right chirality, presumably a measurement error due to the limits of spectroscopy in the 1940's. There is no chemical "ninth configuration" since the actual fraction is 100% rather than 90%.

du Nouy argued that this fraction (and therefore life) was improbable by chance alone.

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OMG Thanks! I have been searching like crazy for an explanation of the ninth configuration. So does the absence of the ninth configuration as we know it today lend more or less credibility to that line by Stacy Keach regarding the probability of life? It's too early for me to wrap my mind around this concept.

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Great post and very concise and like all the other great posts that provide answers rather than more questions, is devoid of people posting... especially creationists.

I just wanted to cite this response to Pierre Lecomte du Noüy theory copied pasted from wikipedia
One of the funniest examples of these kinds of statistics comes from Evolution: Possible or Impossible by James F. Coppedge [who] cites an article by Ulric Jelinek … which claims that the odds are 1 in 10^243 against "two thousand atoms" (the size of one particular protein molecule) ending up in precisely that particular order "by accident." Where did Jelenik get that figure? From Pierre Lecompte du Nouy... who in turn got it from Charles-Eugene Guye, a physicist who died in 1942. Guye had merely calculated the odds of these atoms lining up by accident if "a volume" of atoms the size of the Earth were "shaken at the speed of light." In other words, ignoring all the laws of chemistry, which create preferences for the formation and behavior of molecules, and ignoring that there are millions if not billions of different possible proteins--and of course the result has no bearing on the origin of life, which may have begun from an even simpler protein. This calculation is thus useless for all these reasons, and is typical in that it comes to Coppedge third-hand (and thus to us fourth-hand), and is hugely outdated (it was calculated before 1942, even before the discovery of DNA), and thus fails to account for over half a century of scientific progress.
Richard Carrier, "Bad Science, Worse Philosophy", Addendum B, at The Secular Web (Internet Infidels: 2000)

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