Author:
Wade A. Tisthammer
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Date Posted: 07/ 4/05 12:26pm
In reply to:
Wade A. Tisthammer
's message, "Tertiary" on 04/28/05 3:27pm
I made an error. 10^65 is actually the number of atoms in our galaxy, not the universe. Still, this universe has a finite quantity of galaxies. The estimated number of elementary particles (e.g. electrons, and the particles that make up protons and neutrons) in our universe is estimated to be 10^80. As I said earlier, a typical protein consists of about 300 amino acids (though some are very much longer). Even assuming a tolerance as drastically high as 50% (i.e. half of the amino acids could be replaced and the protein still functions) we still have a probability of no better than 1 in 10^195 in assembling the functional protein by chance. (And remember, in the theory of natural selection, natural selection can only select what chance has first produced.) Even then, that’s just the sequencing of the 20 biologically usable amino acids. There’s still the matter of getting all them L-form amino acids and the proper bonding. In any case, I hope you see why chance has become a rejected explanation among workers in the origin-of-life discipline.
Incidentally, this may be a good time to re-introduce the “chicken and egg” problem of DNA and enzymes. Precise enzymes are needed for the replication of DNA (e.g. the enzyme helicase to unwind the DNA molecule, and other enzymes creating “replication forks” that continue to unzip the macromolecule in both directions, and then we have DNA polymerase…), but these enzymes are produced at the direction of DNA. Why? Well, enzymes are nothing more than proteins (with specific purposes, e.g. acting as catalysts). DNA has the digital information to code the sequence of proteins, including the enzymes. Try to get those enzymes by random chance, and…well you can probably guess why this explanation doesn’t work.
I had one individual (possibly Duane) point to the “RNA world” claiming it solved the problem. It did nothing of the sort. Even if we did know of a way for nature to overcome all the chemical problems of getting RNA via undirected chemical reactions (and there is no such way) and even if there were a known way to get DNA from RNA via undirected chemical reactions (and there is no such way) there’s still the problem of information. DNA by itself isn’t enough to code the enzymes, because the chemical constituents that are responsible for the information in DNA do not chemically interact in any significant way. There aren’t even any bonds between the bases along the information-bearing axis of the molecule, nor are they any differential affinities between the backbone and the various bases that could account for variations in sequencing (incidentally, the same things hold true for RNA). In short, the mere existence of DNA (or even RNA) isn’t enough; it has to contain the right digital information to code the proteins. One could again try to appeal to chance in getting the right code, but that yields the exact same problem of getting the correct protein sequence via chance in the first place.
Biochemist Michael Behe likened the problem of the origin of life to a groundhog trying to cross a busy thousand-lane freeway. The odds are overwhelming that the little critter won’t make it and instead become roadkill. ID theory predicts that we’d find serious and significant barriers to the naturalistic formation of life, and is based on what we do know about life, chemistry, and mathematical probability (as opposed to appealing to undiscovered laws never seen nor observed) as this example illustrates.
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