I went to the dentist last week, and discovered that I was obliged to tell him, ‘I’m on blood-thinners’. Since last I saw him, my doctor had put me on blood anti-coagulants. The dentists like to know that sort of thing in case your mouth starts to bleed in the midst of a procedure.
It got me thinking. Apparently anti-coagulants prevent your blood from coagulating – but just a little bit. You are constructed in such a way that when you get cut, for example a scratch on your knee or a nick on your finger, the blood flows out for a little while but quite soon it begins to coagulate – that’s why so many kids have scabs on their knees. And that’s a good thing because, if it didn’t, all of your blood would pump out which would be bad for the rest of you!
I felt driven to check on this delicate balance of blood clotting – not too much and not too little. It turns out somebody has written on this exact subject. In his book Darwin’s Black Box, Dr. Michael Behe, Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University, calculates the odds against the system of blood-clotting in the human body. He makes it one tenth to the eighteenth power (1 in 1018 – that’s ‘1’ with 18 noughts after it).
Behe says that if an Irish lottery “had odds of winning one-tenth to the eighteenth power, and if a million people played the lottery every year, it would take an average of about a thousand billion years before anyone (not just a particular person) won the lottery. A thousand billion years is roughly a hundred times the current estimate of the age of the universe… unfortunately the universe doesn’t have the time to wait.”[1]
Some of Prof Behe’s colleagues went ballistic because they reckoned he was advocating ‘intelligent design’. They were spooked by the idea that such a design required a Designer. But the design looks intelligent to me. If the dentist had asked me what I thought of the design of coagulation in the human body I definitely wouldn’t have said, ‘It’s stupid’.
[1] Michael J Behe, “Darwin’s Black Box: Biochemical Challenge to Evolution”, Simon & Schuster, 1998
the electrician's children 