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| Chapter 3. Sixteen Fatal Roadblocks against a Purely Natural Formation of Life. Fatal Roadblock Number 3. Spurious Side Chains. If a molecule of some sort is to be added randomly to a forming chain, it is far easier for it to link to the chain at a point in the middle of the chain than it is to first find its end and then link to it there. An extra link in the middle of a chain is called a side chain. An unwanted chain can be called a spurious side chain. Spurious side chains can destroy the effectiveness of a chain that might otherwise have been useful. They also tend to promote tar formation. Enzymes are made from an amino acid string that has been folded into sheets and coils connected to each other by various kinds of loops. A spurious side chain could easily interfere with the ability of an amino acid sequence to form a proper sheet or coil. Hence, an amino acid with a spurious side chain could easily keep an enzyme from forming a proper shape. In some cases, an enzyme might be able to handle one or even several amino acids with spurious side chains. However, it should not take very many of these to make a proper shape impossible to get. In some cases during a random assembly, a spurious side chain might produce a shape that ended up being useful. However, that would have no value for living systems because there would be no means of copying it and a single enzyme by itself is of little value. What would be the odds of our soup producing a long string of amino acids joined without having any spurious side chains attached? I find it interesting that when origin-of-life experiments have been done in the last few years, one of two scenarios apply. 1. The experimenters do not allow anything extraneous in their initial soup mixture in order to keep the experiment from being ruined by early termination and spurious side chains, or 2. They have problems with them and mention them. Typically, though, they do not quantify how big the problem actually is. Hence, I am going to make an assumption for my calculations. To the extent this assumption is true, the calculations are valid. There are several places in each amino acid where a molecule of some kind could join to it as a spurious side chain. For the purpose of our calculations, let’s assume that each amino acid in a chain has one possible location for a side chain. Let’s further assume that the ammonia molecule at the end of the chain is not particularly sacred, that it has the same chance of bonding as do each of the other amino acids in the chain. With that assumption, the following calculations reasonably follow: Starting with a single, isolated amino acid, this amino acid could just as easily connect to a spurious side chain as to a second amino acid and form a peptide bond. Forming the peptide bond would give us a tiny chain of two amino acids. The odds of forming the peptide bond are 1 in 2. With a chain of two amino acids, there are 2 possibilities of side chains, one for each of the amino acids. There is one possibility of extending the chain with a peptide bond to another amino acid. This makes a total of three possibilities. So, the odds of forming a peptide bond are 1 in 3. However, the total odds of a chain of more than one amino acid are equal to the odds of each step multiplied together, so the total odds are 1 in 2 times 1 in 3, which equals 1 in 6. This represents a pattern called a factorial. Thus, the odds of getting 101 amino acids to join together randomly and have only peptide bonds would be 100 factorial. This number is huge. It is equal to 10^158. How big is 10^158? It is 10 with 158 zeroes after it. It looks like this: 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Compared to a number like this, odds of only 100,000,000 to one against winning the lottery almost seem like a guarantee of success. This is a really serious problem. The estimated total number of atoms in the entire universe is only 10^80. This number has only about half the zeroes of our number representing the odds against getting a small enzyme without a spurious side chain. This means if one attempted to randomly put together a chain of 101 amino acids and if every failure were added to the tar, that one could go through all of the matter in the universe and yet would not have even made a dent in the odds against success. Forget about stars. You would have a universe made exclusively of tar. Yet, you would not have a desired, single, unusually tiny enzyme. Of course, this was only for a small enzyme. Suppose one were to compute the odds for a more typical larger one, such as one 400 amino acids in length. Very quickly one is going to reach a number too large for a calculator or computer to do the factorial conversion. And I sure would not want to compute that large a factorial by hand. There is a problem with numbers this extreme. Our brains do not comprehend them. As a result, we tend to discount their seriousness and think they do not matter. It is as though our brain tells us that since we do not relate to it, it is not important. We blank out its significance. Thus, something that is insurmountable in difficulty becomes in our minds something irrelevant. The reality is, though, that an insurmountable problem is truly insurmountable, regardless of whether or not we comprehend it. Of course, there is no reason that the molecules connecting at the end of the chain should be limited to amino acids. They could just as easily be terminators. So, what are the odds of forming an amino acid string without it being undone either by early termination or by spurious side chains? They are simply the product of the two numbers, or 1 in 10^70 times 1 in 10^152. Thus, the odds of forming a successful chain have now become 1 in 10^222. These are some pretty stiff odds against forming a single, tiny enzyme of only 101 amino acids. |