Image Source from the article at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/magazine/evolution-gene-microbiology.html
We are not precisely who we thought we were. We are composite creatures, and our ancestry seems to arise from a dark zone of the living world, a group of creatures about which science, until recent decades, was ignorant. Evolution is trickier, far more complicated, than we realized. The tree of life is more tangled. Genes don’t just move vertically. They can also pass laterally across species boundaries, across wider gaps, even between different kingdoms of life, and some have come sideways into our own lineage — the primate lineage — from unsuspected, nonprimate sources. It’s the genetic equivalent of a blood transfusion or (to use a different metaphor preferred by some scientists) an infection that transforms identity. They called it “infective heredity.”
My quote of the theory of Woese and a reference to the article above is not necessarily an endorsement of his views. As I explained in my article The Creation of Adam from Dust and the Theory of Evolution it is possible to believe in the literal text of Breishit/Genesis and still believe in a modified form of the theory of evolution or one can entirely deny the theory.
My goal here, as well as my goal in some of my other articles, such as, The SETI Proof for the Existence of G-d is to show that it is very, very difficult for science to explain how life exists as we observe it given the laws of nature currently known to us.
Here I will provide a brief excerpt from The Seti Proof … article:
As far as the odds of random chance producing a minimally complex cell, non-Jewish scientist, Stephen Meyer in his book, Signature in the Cell, page 216 writes:
“Since elementary particles can interact with each other only so many times per second (at most 1043), since there are a limited number (1080) of elementary particles and since there has been a limited amount of time since the big bang (1017) there are a limited number of opportunities for any given event to occur in the history of the universe”…
By simply multiplying the 3 relevant factors 1043 X 1080 X 1017 we arrive at 10140 as the maximum total number of events that could have taken place in the entire observable universe.
On page, 219 we learn that the probability of producing a minimally complex cell by chance alone is 1 chance in 1040,861. That is to say that 10140 maximum total number of events in the universe could in no realistic way account for our extremely, “lucky” result of the production of the first complex cell.
The truth of the matter you can make the odds for random luck producing a minimally complex cell much worse by considering the following issues raised by
Ide Trotter, Ph.D. in a brief comment to one of Rabbi Moshe Averick’s articles at http://www.algemeiner.com/2011/08/17/scientists-prove-again-that-life-is-the-result-of-intelligent-
written by: Shlomo Moshe Scheinman