Behold, a life-size replica of a Star Wars X-Wing fighter, made out of LEGOs. According to this article in New York magazine, the full scale model required 5,335,200 LEGOs and took 32 master builders working more than 17,000 hours to complete. The LEGO X-Wing has a wing span of 44 feet, weighing 44,000 pounds. Any parent whose kids enjoyed LEGOs has a memory of stepping barefoot on one of the ubiquitous plastic blocks. But don't worry about the LEGO X-Wing; it's all glued together as one piece. Now whether or not you are a fan of the toy building blocks, you'll  have to admit the LEGO X-Wing fighter is one impressive creation. Compared to the DNA molecule, however, the LEGO X-Wing is actually quite simple. Over five million building blocks were used? That's nothing compared to the six billion bits of information called nucleotides that comprise a DNA molecule, the "LEGO" of life. The complex instructions coded into DNA provide the blueprint for an organism that is produced through an ordered and specific process of development into a body plan. For abiogenesis to have occurred, either the enormously improbable event occurred in which DNA self-organized just in time for some fortuitous catalyst caused inanimate matter to come to life...or, some sort of help was somehow involved. In fact, two-time Nobel Prize-winning scientist Ilya Prigogine said, The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero. While I have tremendous respect for the … [Read more...]