“Despite the difficulties of formally testing evolution—especially back across the eons to the emergence of life itself—Theobald was able to run rigorous statistical analyses on the amino acid sequences in 23 universally conserved proteins across the three major divisions of life (eukaryotes, bacteria and archaea). By plugging these sequences into various relational and evolutionary models, he found that a universal common ancestor is at least 102,860 more likely to have produced the modern-day protein sequence variances than even the next most probable scenario (involving multiple separate ancestors)”.