start with this one:
There are fewer microbes out there than you think
multiply by the number of generations since earth history, multiply by the number of mutations per generation and you will not get more then 10^50 mutations.
-_- dude, bacteria don't reproduce at a set rate. Some species divide more than once an hour, while others go months without dividing or more. The number of generations that life on this planet has gone through is not a known number.
Furthermore, mechanisms to fix and prevent mutations present in modern cells likely weren't present in the first life on this planet, meaning that early on, there were likely far more mutations per generation than what occurs in a modern bacterial cell. This and more contributes to the fact that mutations throughout all of Earth's history are not quantifiable.
Plus, taking into account your source's number of microbes which are just on the ocean floor (an area bereft of nutrients to the point that it isn't representative of the majority of microbes alive currently at all, but still to high for your 10^50 assertion nevertheless) which is approximately 2.9x10^29. Unlike in petri dishes, bacteria in nature do not have exponential growth curves due to nutrient limitations and predation by other organisms, so let's say that these have been maintaining their numbers for 10 generations and that each generation occurs at a crawl of 1 per year. So, I'll do the calculation as if half of them die and the other half divide every year, meaning that 1.45x10^29 are produced every generation. Bacteria generally have a mutation rate of 0.003 per generation, so in one generation here 4.35x10^26 mutations would occur every generation, and in that mere 10 year time span with this very slow to divide population, that would of course be 4.35x10^27 mutations.
So, in this example that doesn't even cover all of the bacteria currently alive and assumes an extremely long generation time, they exceed your "calculated limit on the number of mutations that has occurred in all life" in less than 300 years. So I ask again, where are you actually getting 10^50, because it isn't your source giving it.
sure. you can reduce it from about 4 to 2 possible codons. it will not change much the big picture. 2^1000 or 3^1000 is still a huge number.
You entirely missed my point; it doesn't matter how unlikely a specific given mutation is when it demonstrably wouldn't have to proceed the exact same to get an identical result. You are behaving as if because life on this planet ended up as it is genetically that the process by which it formed MUST guarantee that those specific genes arise, but that is simply not the case. This isn't winning a lottery, this is having a lotto ticket which has numbers that add up to one that's divisible by 3. There's a lot of tickets that would work, and it is just the one that ends up happening first that persists.
sure. how many combinations do you think are functional? like the number of sand grains on earth? you can even miltiply it by itself and it will still be a small number compare to the whole number.
I explained in my previous post that the number of functional combinations are not quantifiable. Any opinion I have on the possible number is irrelevant as it would be purely speculative. But, again, without that number being known, it would be impossible to even begin to determine the probability of functional sequences arising... though plenty of known functional sequences are so short that their appearance would be an inevitability.