Chemical Evolution, Part III: DNA

The Design is in the Details

In part one I described how Miller’s attempts to produce the essential building blocks of life in the laboratory failed because, even though Miller did succeed in producing amino acids, the ones he produced were of the wrong variety. Miller’s experiment produced the right-handed variety (dextro) while the amino acids necessary to yield life are of the left-handed variety (levo). Moreover, Miller's experiment also produced several organic acids which would have destroyed the amino acids he created long before they formed a protein. To prevent this from happening, Miller had to use a “cold trap” to isolate the amino acids from the organic acids as soon as they were formed. In other words, the only reason the amino acids survived was due to the intelligent intervention of Miller. But let us assume for the moment that Miller had succeeded in creating the right kind of amino acids needed to yield life. And let us further assume that he was able to produce them without the organic acids that would have instantaneously destroyed them. Would it then have been possible for the amino acids to link up together and form the first functional protein necessary to sustain a living cell? The answer is a resounding NO. This is because the more difficult problem that abiogenesis faces has yet to even be discussed: information. What must be explained is not only how the organic building blocks of life can be created via natural processes, but the source of information that properly assembled those building blocks to form the first life form. Paul Davies summed up this obstacle for abiogenesis well by employing the metaphor of building a house:

Let us consider another example. A novel is composed of letters which combine to form sentences, which in turn, combine to form paragraphs. But if these letters were not ordered in the exact way that they are, they would appear nonsensical to us. Consider the following sequence of letters: MIET NDA DTIE ATIW RFO NO NMA. Doesn’t make much sense does it. That’s because while the sequence is complex, it is not specified. In other words, the letters do not conform to any independently-given pattern. But suppose we were to re-arrange the letters in the following way: TIME AND TIDE WAIT FOR NO MAN. Suddenly the same letters convey a message to our brains. The first sequence is complex but is not specified. The second sequence is both complex and specified. Systems that are characterized by both specificity and complexity have what we call "information content." That is, they have the ability to transmit information to intelligent agents. Scientists have found that the same is true of the coded information found in human DNA.

In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule. By now most people are familiar with the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. It is like a long ladder, twisted into a spiral. Molecular biologists have discovered how DNA stores the information necessary to direct protein synthesis. It was Crick who first proposed the "sequence hypothesis". According to the sequence hypothesis, information on the DNA molecule is stored in the form of specifically arranged chemicals called nucleotide bases along the spine of DNA’s helical strands. Chemists represent these four nucleotides with the letters A, T, G, and C (for adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine). By 1961, a series of brilliant experiments confirmed DNA’s information-bearing properties. The amount of information in the DNA is so vast that it led Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins to claim that the amount of information in just a single strand of DNA would fill up 1,000 Enclyclopedia Brittanicas! The DNA molecule is exquisitely complex, but in addition to its complexity, it is also specified. Like the above sequence of letters, the 'letters' in DNA must be in a very precise sequence. If they are out of order then the information that the DNA transmits to the cell is garbled and will lead to a loss of cellular function. To summarize, the information found within DNA is both complex and specified. Hence, scientists have come to refer to it as “specified complexity”.

But how does all this lead one to the conclusion of design? Well, first of all no natural processes are known to produce structures with high information content like that found in DNA. Furthermore, if we consult everyday experience, we readily note that objects with a high information content such as books, computer programs, and musical scores are always the result of an intelligent source. For example, if you were to trace the information on your computer screen back to its original source you would invariably come to a mind--that of a software engineer or programmer. As Bill Gates has noted, "DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we've ever created." Moreover, it is important to note that this is not just a case of reasoning by analogy. It is more than an analogy. In fact, in terms of structure, the two are virtually identical. All this leads us to one inevitable conclusion. If the information content found in human language and computer language is always the result of an intelligent designer, then it is only logical to conclude that the information content found in DNA is also the result of an intelligent designer.

Chemical Evolution, Part II: What Are the Odds?

In my last post I delivered a brief overview of the theory of chemical evolution and the failure of scientists to explain the origins of the first life on earth. The difficulty stems from the fact that chemical evolution, like Big Bang theory, is a branch of origins science which deals with events that occurred only once (allegedly) and in the distant past. Although there is no way to directly observe the origins of the first life form on earth, it seems to me that there are only two options when dealing with the origins of life on earth. Either the first life form came from non-living material in a primeval soup (as Darwin speculated), the lucky result of random chance and natural processes, or the first life form was created by an intelligent being of some kind and hence, the product of purposeful mind. So it seems we must either subscribe to Intelligent Design theory or Abiogenesis. If there is a third option that I am overlooking please present it so that it may be given equal consideration.

In considering the two options, we should ask ourselves: Are both theories equally plausible or is one more likely than the other? To answer this question scientists utilize statistics and probability. In the 1950’s the French mathematician Dr. Emil Borel, one of the world’s foremost experts on mathematical probability, formulated what scientists and mathematicians today refer to as the basic “law of probability.” Borel’s law of probability states that the occurrence of any event, where the chances are beyond 10^50 (ten followed by 50 zeroes), is an event that we can state with certainty will never happen, no matter how much time is allotted and no matter how many opportunities could exist for the event to take place. In 1981, Cambridge astronomer and mathematician Fred Hoyle decided to apply Borel’s law of probability to the theory of chemical evolution. With the help of his fellow scientist Chandra Wickramisinghe, Hoyle determined that the probability of life arising from non-life in a primeval soup is at least 1 in 1 x 10^950, a number far greater than 10^50 which Dr. Borel presented as the limit for possibility. To illustrate the extreme unlikelihood of this ever occurring, Hoyle used an analogy. He compared the probability of life arising from non-life to lining up 1,050 blind people, giving each one a scrambled Rubik's Cube, and finding that they all solve the cube at the same moment! These incredible odds led Hoyle to state that the probability of abiogenesis "is about the same as the probability that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard could assemble a Boeing 747 from the contents therein."

Hoyle and Wickramisinghe’s calculations showed that it is quite impossible for the functional structure of proteins to come about by chance. For instance, an average-sized protein molecule composed of 288 amino acids, can be arranged in 10^300 different ways. (This is an astronomically huge number, consisting of 1 followed by 300 zeros.) Of all of these possible sequences, only one forms the protein molecule needed to yield life. The rest of them are amino-acid chains that are either totally useless, or else potentially harmful to living things. In other words, the probability of the formation of only one protein molecule is "1 in 10^300. The probability of this “one” actually occurring is practically nil because as Borel showed, probabilities smaller than 1 over 10^50 are considered to have zero probability of occurring. Even if we suppose that amino acids have combined and decomposed by a "trial and error" method, without losing any time since the formation of the earth, in order to form a single protein molecule, the time that would be required for something with a probability of 10^950 to happen would still hugely exceed the estimated age of the earth. The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that chemical evolution falls into a terrible abyss of improbability, even when it comes to the formation of a single protein. Even the most prominent evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins admit this. In his book, appropriately titled Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins admits:

"The sort of lucky event we are looking at could be so wildly improbable that the chances of its happening, somewhere in the universe, could be as low as one in a billion billion billion in any one year."

The extreme improbability, indeed, the impossibility of abiogenesis having occured led Hoyle’s colleague and professor of applied mathematics and astronomy, Chandra Wickramasinghe to the inevitable conclusion that:

"The likelihood of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it. It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other...and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence."

Chemical Evolution, Part I: A Brief Overview

GOODGREYPOET has just completed an excellent three-part series on Chemical Evolution and the Design Inference.  The first installation is posted below, and will soon be followed by parts two and three of the series.  Enjoy!

Chemical evolution, sometimes called abiogenesis, is the theory that the first life form on earth arose from a primordial soup of non-living chemicals. This first life form would have been simple, not nearly as complex as life as we know it today. Although some Darwinists claim that Darwin’s theory of evolution is distinct from the theory of chemical evolution, Darwin himself recognized the need to explain the origins of life on Earth. After all, before life can evolve in the Darwinian sense, it must first exist. In a letter to J.D. Hooker Darwin speculated that life may have sprung from non-living chemicals in a “warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present…”. This sounds silly to us, but up until the 19^th century it was commonly believed that life frequently arose from non-life under certain circumstances, a process that was known as spontaneous generation. This belief stemmed from the observation that maggots appeared to arise spontaneously when organic matter such as dead meat was left exposed. It was later discovered by Louis Pasteur that life only arises from life and cannot arise from non-life. This has come to be known as the law of biogenesis.

But despite Pasteur’s discovery, many scientists have since conducted prebiotic experiments hoping to demonstrate how the first life form on earth could have arisen from non-living chemicals, thus proving Darwin’s hypothesis. Perhaps the most famous of these experiments was the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment. Stanley Miller reported that he conducted an experiment which simulated the primeval conditions on Earth and had succeeded in producing the chemical compounds that were essential for life to begin. In his experiment, Miller used a gas mixture that he believed would have existed on the primordial earth, composed of ammonia, methane, hydrogen, and water vapor. Since these gases would not react with each other under natural conditions he added energy to the mixture to start a reaction among them. Hypothesizing that this energy could have come from lightning in the primordial atmosphere, he used an electric current to simulate lightning. However, thanks to scientific progress Miller’s experiment has been shown to be flawed in many ways. By the 1980’s scientists had come to realize that the atmosphere that Miller simulated in his experiment was very different from what the primeval earth’s atmosphere would have been like. While Miller used methane, hydrogen and ammonia in his experiment, it is now known that the early earth atmosphere was composed of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. And this was just one of the flaws in Miller’s experiment. For those interested in reading more about the flaws in the Miller-Urey experiment go here.

Since the Miller experiement, there have been a few other attempts to simulate the primeval earth atmosphere in order to demonstrate how the first life on earth could have arose from non-living chemicals and gases, but all have met with limited or no success. Still, many proponents of chemical evolution continue to assert that given enough time and the right circumstances, life could have originated from non-living matter. But how can we ever know for sure? After all, chemical evolution is a branch of origins science. Unlike operational science which observes how  physical laws operate in the present, origins science deals with events that occurred in the distant past. Origins science deals with things like the Big Bang and the origin of life, events that only happened once (allegedly) and cannot be recreated in the laboratory. Since they occurred in the distant past, such events cannot be directly observed (unless one has a time machine and can travel back to the moment of the big bang or the moment when life first appeared in a primeval soup). So how can we determine the validity of a theory that cannot be directly observed or recreated in a laboratory? That is the question I will address in part two. Stay tuned...

Debate: Ward-Meyer

TVW is rebroadcasting the Seattle Townhall debate between Peter Ward and Stephen C. Meyer as part of their "Best of 2006".  You can view the debate or download the audio here.

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