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| Chapter 3. Sixteen Fatal Roadblocks against a Purely Natural Formation of Life. Fatal Roadblock Number 14. Chiral Instability. Evolutionists like to talk as though there were tens of millions of years available to make the progression from the appearance of the first enzymes or self-replicating molecules until the first fully developed cell appears. However, this is only wishful thinking. An issue called chiral instability reduces this down to something closer to thirty years. This is far, far too short a period of time for evolutionary processes to create a fully developed cell in the wild from scratch. By comparison, it has already been over fifty years since 1952, when Stanley Miller first did his spark chamber experiment. Most biological chemicals appear in mirror image forms, called left-handed and right handed. This characteristic is called “chirality.” Most amino acids have this characteristic and this presents a problem. Enzymes are made of coils and sheets formed out of a single, continuous string of amino acids. These amino acids are normally in the “left-handed” form. All it takes is for a single right- handed amino acid to be placed in a sheet or coil, and it will force the coil out of its proper shape. The ripple effect will destroy the shape of the entire enzyme, rendering it useless. The problem is that some of the most common amino acids spontaneously flip from one form to the other in a relatively short period of time. As we shall see, this has a major impact on the maximum time available for chemical evolution to produce a fully functioning cell. The maximum time is reduced from the tens or hundreds of millions of years proposed by evolutionists down to about 30 years. This is a significant issue. A recent article in the Biological Pharmaceutical Bulletin discussed how the accumulation of enzymes that have flipped chirality can affect a person’s health in only a few years. So, this is not just a theoretical problem, it is an issue that affects the health of every senior citizen. Here are some key points taken from the article, reworded for simplicity: 17
whenever it appears in a newly formed enzyme. Recently, however, right-handed forms have been detected in various human tissues such as eye lenses, brain, teeth, skin, bone, aorta, erythrocytes, lung, and ligaments from elderly individuals. Also the right-handed forms of two amino acids, serine and aspartic acid, were found in certain brain tissues in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Aspartic acid in human tooth enamel was found to flip its chiral form at a rate equal to 1 out of every 1,200 molecules per year. Thus, any protein (or enzyme) molecule that lasts a long lifetime in the body will accumulate right-handed aspartic acid molecules with age. For instance, about 8% of the total aspartic acid in tooth enamel in the right-handed form after 60 years. Therefore, right-handed amino acids in proteins can be interpreted as molecular markers of aging. It is well known that deposits of what is called “b -amyloid protein” in the brain causes Alzheimer’s disease. Analysis of the problem proteins revealed the presence of a significant amount of right-handed amino acids. Proteins with these right-handed amino acids have a greater tendency to aggregate (form tar) than those without them. Recently, the authors of the article found right-handed aspartic acid molecules in the elastic fibers of skin from elderly donors. By contrast, only left-handed molecules were found in young people and in skin tissues not exposed to the sun. These results suggest that the accumulation of right-handed molecules of aspartic acid is accelerated by exposure to sunlight and that the exceptional protein accumulates in aged skin during UV-related aging. Let’s interpret the significance of the above items that were presented in the journal. Most cells in the body have a maintenance system that regularly replaces the enzymes in the cell. Normally, all the amino acids in a cell will be replaced within any seven-year span. There are a number of issues that can degrade the quality of a protein or an enzyme. Spontaneous hydrolysis, spurious cross-linking, and chiral flips are among these. As long as the maintenance system can stay ahead of the degradation, the cell remains healthy. However, there is some indication that a person’s maintenance system slows down as he ages. In addition, sometimes a maintenance system can be overwhelmed by other problems which develop. Either of these problems can result in degraded enzymes accumulating. This in turn can kill a cell. For instance, it appears that Alzheimer’s is actually a result of an improperly functioning maintenance system. Whether the problem is due to the maintenance system itself or something else which overwhelms the maintenance system is currently not understood. Because of chiral instability, enzymes will spontaneously degrade. These destroyed enzymes then will accumulate, aggregate, and become tar, even as the article mentioned happens in Alzheimer’s patients. If the tar is not removed from the cell, the cell dies. Of course, our concern is not Alzheimer’s disease. Rather, it is the impact of chiral changes in an origin-of-life scenario. A cellular maintenance system is extremely complicated. It cannot exist in a cell until all of the other features are available and working properly, such as raw information, information decoding systems, reproduction, energy metabolism, cell-membranes, etc. As people age, it seems that the cellular maintenance system is one of the first components of a cell to function inadequately. This is a measure of the complexity of physical life. If the maintenance system does not keep up with the rate at which proteins get damaged, then defective enzymes begin to accumulate in the cell and form tar deposits. After two or three decades, these damaged enzymes can kill the cell. The significance for us is that the issue of chiral instability places a maximum time allowable for an emerging cell in an origin of life scenario to develop a maintenance system. A typical enzyme in a living system ranges from 200 to 1,000 amino acids. Let’s consider a 400- amino acid enzyme, which is simply an average-sized, ordinary enzyme. Aspartic acid, the most rapid flipper, averages about 5% of enzyme content. This means that our 400-amino acid enzyme will have about 20 aspartic acid molecules in it. If only one of these 20 molecules flips it chiral form, the enzyme will be destroyed. Thus, each year about 2% of these enzymes will be destroyed by an aspartic acid change. After thirty years, about half of these enzymes will have been added to the tar. Currently it is not known what fraction of accumulated, degraded enzymes it takes to kill a cell. However, excessive tar does kill cells, as has been observed in Alzheimer’s patients. If in thirty years about half of the normal-sized enzymes in a cell are destroyed by tar, then it seems that thirty years would be about the maximum time a cell could survive—unless it has a means to remove the tar. This means that an emerging first cell has about thirty years from the time it first starts assembling random components together until it has progressed sufficiently far in its development to provide a maintenance system capable of removing degraded (denatured) enzymes. So, if in an origin-of-life scenario, an emerging first cell had acquired everything with the exception of a maintenance system capable of dealing with chiral instability, how long could such a cell survive? Although it is difficult to compute exactly, based on the things we currently understand, the period is probably not more than about thirty years. Thirty years is certainly way too short a period of time for an emerging cell to progress from a random collection of chemicals to an organized cell, complete with DNA and information in the DNA. It is too short to evolve the roughly 2,000 unique enzymes needed to do everything required for an isolated cell to sustain independent life in the wild. Forget the millions of years that evolutionists talk about as being available to develop the first cell. The actual maximum period, from start to finish including a maintenance system, is more realistically about thirty years. Evolution is presented as a slow, gradual process. Chiral instability does not allow slow, gradual processes to be used. Thus, effectively all of a cell’s components to form in a single step. Only a Creator God can make a cell with all of its organizational complexity in a single step. Science points to a Creator God as the source of life. |