Truth Really Matters

I was sharing the Gospel with a college student, an atheist and a science major (I forget which discipline), but he was committed to his evolutionary worldview.  I raised some specific issues about the impossibility of biology arising from chemistry, namely that even one cell was too complex and sophisticated to arise from some primordial goo.

He countered that, sure, the first cell would have been ‘improbable,’ but if, somehow, it had popped into existence, then the rest of the ecosystem would certainly arise via Darwinian processes, that mutations and natural selection would take over to generate every other form of life under the sun.

So I explained to him that those impossibilities would be even more incredible than first life, because of the generation times and the overwhelming complexity of multi-celled creatures compared to bacteria.  Generation times – even under the fantasy of Darwinism, you must wait many generations to see if a ‘favorable mutation’ takes hold in the population.  There aren’t enough billions of years (or trillions or quadrillions) in any Big Bang fantasy to allow for such luck.

(I discuss many of these issues in my free ebook on this site, Creation vs. Evolution:  No Contest!, which you can download from the free ebookstore.  This book is supplemented by the essays in the Creation/Evolution short course section.)

And yet you can’t get from chemistry to biology for even a first lucky cell in trillions of years.  One way to characterize the hurdles is summarized in The Stairway to Life, the 2020 book by Change Laura Tan and Rob Stadler.  Tan is a PhD biochemist, while Stadler is a PhD medical engineer with an MS in electrical engineering.

They conclude their book with this admonition:  “All observable evidence states that only a preexisting living cell can make another living cell.  It appears that the more we know about life at the molecular level, the more we lose hope for finding a natural materialistic explanation for the origin of life.  Indeed, it is fundamentally important for us to know where we came from.  However, it is even more important for us to know where we are going.  If we don’t know that either, we will certainly make a mess of what lies in between.”

The book’s argument is based on a schematic, a 12-step staircase that rises from random chemistry all the way up to biology, the first living cell.  Each step entails real impossibilities such that even if ‘a miracle occurred’ at any given step, the next step higher would pose an insuperable barrier to materialistic processes.  So let’s take a quick look at the steps, mentioning just a few examples . . .

http://icrapoport.com/?fbclid=PAAaaiTHUie8AWT6CBrYGwq8G7VNYCAdvxdB-ol7-qXUrEEphhsuadqJA6Yts Step 1:  Formation and concentration of building blocks

The basic building blocks of life include amino acids, sugars, nitrogenous bases, and phospholipids.  Experiments that began with Stanley Miller and Harold Urey’s famous 1953 paper, “A Production of Amino Acids Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions,” gave evolutionists some hope that ‘natural’ conditions might generate the amino acids suitable for life.  But these experiments are conducted under conditions carefully constrained by professional chemists and there is no evidence that such conditions correlate with any environment on an alleged ‘ancient’ Earth.  Also, the experiments generate a wide variety of unwanted reaction products that would interfere destructively with any progress toward life.

One issue with nucleotides, which would necessarily be formed under entirely different conditions than amino acids, is the multiplicity of forms they can take.  “Ribose exists in five different forms in water solution.  Adenine could bond to any one of the four hydroxyl (OH) groups of ribose, and phosphate could bond with any of the three remaining hydroxyl groups.  Adenine has a choice of three NH locations for bonding to ribose.  Thus we have 5 X 4 X 3 X 3 = 180 possible arrangements of an adenine nucleotide, but only one (ie., the canonical form) is observed in all of life.”  Similar issues exist for the other three DNA / RNA nucleotides.  So the odds of stringing together a long chain of just the right forms randomly selected out of a magical soup that generates nucleotides . . . it’s astronomical.

Rincón de la Victoria Step 2:  Homochirality of Building Blocks

In 1957 a German pharma company marketed the drug thalidomide, initially as a sedative, but then successfully as a treatment for morning sickness during pregnancy.  The thalidomide molecule comes in two chiral forms – the molecules are not identical, but rather mirror images of each other.  The production process produced both forms, a ‘racemic mixture.’  It turned out that one of the forms produced the sedative effect, but the other caused severe birth defects.  The drug was banned after harming thousands of children.

Amino acids come in two chiral forms, left-handed and right-handed.  Only the left-handed work in life’s proteins.  Just one right-handed amino acid in a protein can interfere with function.  The nucleotides in DNA and RNA can exhibit a wide variety of chiral forms, but only one, ‘right-handed,’ works in life.  The phospholipids of cell membranes are also homochiral.

Despite considerable research efforts, no natural way has been found to produce the molecules of life in pure homochiral forms.  Imagine a protein molecule formed from a chain of 400 amino acids.  The odds of selecting 400 consecutive left-handed aminos from a racemic mixture are 1 in 2⁴⁰⁰, equivalent to flipping a coin heads-up 400 times in a row.  In powers of 10, that’s about 1 in 10¹²⁰.  You have a far better chance of picking just the right atom out of the entire universe – with 10⁸⁰ atoms.

Step 3:  A solution for the water paradox

A quote from chemist James Tour:  “Organic synthesis is very hard to do in water.  Highly oxygenated organic compounds are needed.  The synthetic chemist must project the oxygenated groups out toward the water domain, and project the non-oxygenated groups in toward each other, thus generating a hydrophobic domain.  It is very hard to do.”

In short, you can’t have life without water.  But water will prevent life’s molecules from forming without an already existing cell.  Water discourages the polymerization of both nucleotides and amino acids, and water degrades DNA, RNA, and proteins if they already exist.  This is the “paradox of water.”

In polymerization reactions, every time you add another molecule to the chain, you generate a water molecule.  But these reactions “run backwards” even more easily.  Water depolymerizes the chains.  Nick Lane describes this as “a bit like trying to wring out a wet cloth under water.”  For polymerization to work in life you need a cell’s machinery and control volumes, and a careful source of applied energy, “just as your car needs a source of energy to move uphill.”

Step 4:  Consistent linkage of building blocks

In addition to the rarity of the proper forms of amino acids and nucleotides, when they chain together, they must hook up at just the right positions on the molecules.  This does not happen without a cell’s machinery.  If amino A hooks onto the wrong point of amino B, the protein doesn’t fold correctly and it doesn’t work, “just as a train with one derailed boxcar can destroy the entire train.”  Only an existing cell’s machinery can do this job.

Many experiments have been done that demonstrate . . . “All empirical evidence tells us that homolinkage of DNA, RNA, and proteins can only be achieved via the highly specific and catalytic activity of enzymes and ribozymes or via the careful planning of intelligent agents [chemists].  In short, without the intervention of intelligent agents, existing biopolymers are required for the production of biopolymers.”

Step 5:  Biopolymer reproduction

Since all cells come from other cells, reproduction must have started well before the first cell, at the molecular level.  Reproduction of DNA, though, is a very complex process.  Even the simplest of prokaryotes (cells without a nucleus) require careful coordination of fourteen enzymes.  RNA is somewhat simpler than DNA and so some subscribe to an “RNA world” where that molecule is at the genesis of life.

Replicating RNA unfortunately requires a supply of pure homochiral molecules plus plenty of a protein enzyme that enables nucleotides to join a growing RNA molecule.  This replicase enzyme consists of 1200 amino acids hooked in a specific sequence.  Saying that RNA can self-replicate is akin to claiming that computer viruses replicate themselves . . . without any computer hardware involved.

There are other difficulties.  Shorter RNA molecules replicate faster than long ones, so it’s clear that in any competition, short RNA wins.  But you need very long RNA to have a shot at complexity.  And then there must be a magical transition at some point to the much different DNA system that life employs.

Step 6:  Nucleotide sequences forming useful code

I’ve discussed this issue in other parts of this site, including my ebook on creation / evolution.  Briefly, the odds against getting a sequence of amino acids right, in order to make a functional protein or, equivalently, getting the nucleic acid sequence in DNA right to code for that protein are impossible – ridiculously impossible.  Even if all the mass in the universe was transformed into a vat of amino acids and polymerization reactions were encouraged for trillions of years, you would not get one functional protein.

Step 7:  Means of gene regulation

Even if all previous steps have been achieved, somehow, and we have a collection of the right genes, they must be carefully regulated.  “Living organisms require highly coordinated, selfless molecular activity – more like an orchestra and less like an oligarchy.”  Otherwise, some reactions run amok and others fail to produce just the right products at just the right place and at just the right time.  A living cell is a complex, dynamic system with many feedback loops.  Most of the DNA in a living cell seems to code for RNA and protein molecules that are key to regulating internal cellular processes.

Disruption of any of hundreds of regulatory processes likely results in cell death.  So how do you randomly create the regulatory systems at the same time you randomly generate the genes and enzymes that code for the cell’s structures?

Step 8:  Means for repairing biopolymers

The information stored in your body’s DNA is continually under attack from radiation, oxidation, chemical mutagens, pathogens, and water.  In each of your cells, every day, your DNA typically suffers 2,000 – 10,000 depurinations, 600 depyrimidinations, 10,000 cases of oxidative damage, 55,000 single-strand breaks, and 10 double-strand breaks.

Fortunately, your cells have sophisticated repair mechanims!  Dysfunctions in these repair mechanisms usually result in serious diseases and often, death.  Even in reproduction, repair systems are required to get it right.  In bacterial reproduction, a ‘proofreading system’ decreases the error rate from one in 100,000 base pairs to one in 10,000,000.

These error correcting systems are coded into the cell’s DNA . . . so they are already there along with every other system.  A Nobel Laureate, Manfred Eigen, discovered limits to the length of an alleged prebiotic molecule due to its reproductive error rate.  Longer molecules generated more errors and that leads to dysfunctional catastrophe.  Beyond a length of 100 nucleotides you need an error correcting system.  But such systems must be coded onto a nucleotide chain that is much longer than the catastrophic limit.  This has been called Eigen’s paradox.

Step 9:  Selectively permeable membranes

“A living cell requires a continuous supply of building materials and energy and requires the removal of waste.”  If the cell membrance fails to get either function precisely right, the cell dies.

One membrane requirement is to maintain a higher concentration of protons on one side relative to the other.  Cyanide poisoning, for example, kills by disrupting this proton gradient.  The membrane must be tight enough to block protons, but still allow much larger molecules to pass back and forth, all in a controlled manner.  The membrane contains a multitude of specialized pores composed of proteins.  About one-third of all known proteins produced by cells fulfill functions in membranes.  Pores are triggered open and closed by chemical signals.

The system is complex and must be in place before a cell can possibly survive.  And everything inside the cell must be in place and operating for the cell’s membrane to function meaningfully.

Step 10:  Means of harnessing energy

The cell employs the proton gradient across its membrane to charge “batteries” such as adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the “universal battery of life.”  The energy stored in ATP is used to activate amino acids for protein synthesis, copying DNA, untangling DNA, breaking bonds, transporting molecules, and contracting muscles.

There are three complexes of molecules to transport electrons to specific locations to enable the proton gradient to form, pumping protons across the membrane.  “It uses a careful and extraordinarily precise sequence of fifteen reactions.”  Electrons are very difficult to control.  If they get loose, they form free radicals which damage the cell.

ATP is produced by ATP synthase, a fantastically complex molecular machine common to all life. The simplest variety consists of at least twenty interconnected proteins.  The authors recommend you view animated tutorials about ATP synthase on YouTube.

No one has even imagined a ‘simple’ form of energy generation that could work for a ‘protocell.’  And it is impossibility cubed to suppose that the ATP energy generation system came to be from random chemistry.  (It’s impossible to form even one functional protein from random chemistry.)

Step 11:  Interdependency of DNA, RNA, and proteins

The authors, as they do at each step, ask you to imagine that all previous steps (ten in this case) have somehow been achieved by natural processes.  This would include information-bearing RNA molecules with limited enzymatic function.  But now the cell must transition to an entirely separate information storage and processing system based on DNA.

The limited enzymatic function that some RNA molecules occasionally perform “has no correspondence to the sequence of amino acids that make a protein enzyme with similar function . . . There is no known means of translating an RNA function into a protein function.”  In effect our protocell must start over in inventing the DNA system.

Additionally, reproducing DNA requires a complex suite of proteins that are coded in the very DNA molecules they serve to reproduce!  DNA cannot be replicated without these proteins “and evolution cannot occur without replication.”

“The longer the DNA, the longer the DNA.”  Life requires a very long DNA molecule.  An E. coli contains a circular DNA molecule with 4.6 million base pairs.  Your human DNA has over 3 billion base pairs.  Maintaining a long DNA molecule requires much maintenance, with tools (proteins) encoded within the DNA.  So “the more complex DNA becomes, the more complex it must become in order to remain functional.”  For a cell to be viable, all these systems must be in place from the beginning.

Step 12:  Coordinated cellular purpose

“Life has an inborn purpose that coordinates all activity.  This inborn purpose simply cannot be obtained by random arrangement and natural selection; it must be inherited from the parent cell.”  Rudolf Virchow coined the Latin phrase, Omnis cellula e cellula – “every cell comes from a previous cell.”  Much of what a cell inherits from its parent is information and structure exterior to the genome.  This is the burgeoning research field of epigenetics.  Stephen Meyer has described some of the implications in his book Signature in the Cell, which I have reviewed on this site.  All of the epigenetic information must be there to inherit for the daughter cell to function, to live.

All the biochemical processes inside the cell, and its interactions with the environment are aimed toward specific purposes, to find its way in the environment, to find food, to reproduce, to interact in specific ways with other cells.  In human life, we have ultimate purposes – we don’t think much about what’s going on biochemically in our cells.  Life is about these purposes.  The biochemistry serves these purposes.  Life is top-down, starting with the Creator of all life, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Stephen Covey:  “All things are created twice; first mentally; then physically.  The key to creativity is to begin with the end in mind, with a vision and a blue print of the desired result.”

The Synthia Experiment

In 2010 Craig Venter and his research team completed a 15-year effort to synthesize a living cell – they called it Synthia.  In their announcement they declared it was “the first self-replicating species that we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”  The team employed more than 40 researchers and spent about 40 million dollars.  A review of the work by neurosurgeons Georgios Zenonos and Jeong Eun Kim included the pronouncement, “Not only did Venter’s audacious statements and claims of ‘synthetic’ life mark a triumph of biotechnological ingenuity, but they also undermined the foundations of religions, cosmotheories, cultures, ethics, and law, questioning the essence of life itself.”

Wow.  Bold statement.  Is it fair?

Tan and Stadler devote the first section of their book to analyzing the Synthia experiment.  They explain that Venter skipped the first two steps of the Stairway by purchasing purified homochiral nucleotides produced by living organisms and borrowing additional building blocks of life from an existing bacterium.  They avoided the water paradox via carefully designed reactions that used pre-prepared reagents stored and used in a water-free environment and a sterile atmosphere.

They were constrained to build the DNA one short segment at a time because of errors that occurred often in bonding location.  There was considerable trial and error in these processes.  They borrowed the machinery of other cells whenever needed, including for the construction of DNA and for replication. “The genes, the regulatory mechanisms, and the biopolymer repair mechanisms of Synthia were entirely borrowed from Myco and Capri.  The membrane- and energy-harvesting machinery of Synthia was inherited from Capri, but over time it was replaced by Synthia through the use of its own genome.”

There is much more to say about how the team employed life to construct life.  A complex and brilliant research effort?  Undoubtedly.  But life designed from scratch on a computer?  No.  Even if it were . . . well, it would be design, wouldn’t it?

In conclusion . . . The only reason the evolutionary worldview, including abiogenesis, still exists is because of man’s determination to deny and to defy God.  The fantasy of evolution is truly ridiculous, but will always be the religion of the educational establishment.  They dare not admit the possibility of the God of the Bible, who will be their Judge someday.

I heartily recommend the book.  It’s not a book to speedread because the details involve some complexity.  But anyone can get the point of each chapter.  And if you have a friend who is a scientist or a science student, this book can help to slam dunk his or her evolutionarily blind faith.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com