| Creation Truth Outreach, Inc. Pamphlet |
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| Chapter 3. Sixteen Fatal Roadblocks against a Purely Natural Formation of Life. Fatal Roadblock Number 5. Unusable Ratios of Building Blocks. The pre-life soup would have been missing essential ingredients. Beyond this, even the ingredients it did have would have been in the wrong ratios for random combinations to be useful. The following ratios of amino acids are taken from the earlier table of Miller’s results:
1.7% Alanine (water-repelling) 0.02% Glutamic Acid (water-attracting with negative charge) 0.02% Aspartic Acid (water-attracting with negative charge) < 0.002% Other, trace amino acids Notice, in round numbers there are about one hundred times as much glycine and alanine formed as glutamic acid and aspartic acid. This observation leads to a number of new problems. Even if long strings of amino acids could form without early termination, without spurious side chains, and without rapid disassociation because of chemical equilibrium, we still have serious problems. First of all, enzyme shapes are built up from various combinations of coils and sheets. A common, typical coil is made from a string of about 10 or more amino acids. 8 A typical sheet is made from a string of about 36 or more amino acids in its formation, but can be more than 100. 9 Certain of the twenty amino acids tend to form sheets. Others tend to form coils. These are tendencies, not absolute characteristics. The various other amino acids near a particular amino acid exert a major influence in whether a particular amino acid becomes part of a sheet, a coil, or an interconnecting loop. However, one thing is clear. The four amino acids shown above are not adequate to form sheets and coils. Usable enzymes cannot be made from only the four kinds of amino acids provided by Miller. To add to the difficulties, all of the water-attracting amino acids Miller produced had a negative charge. He did not produce any positively-charged amino acids and no one else has done so in usable amounts either. Yet, in real life, there tend to be roughly equal numbers of amino acids with positive charge as with negative charge. This balance is necessary to get an enzyme to fold properly. So, if all of the available water-attracting amino acids have a negative charge and there are not any positively charged amino acids available for balance, then getting a proper enzyme shape would be impossible. There is yet another issue. Remember our discussion about tar, about how water pushes non- polar molecules together until they aggregate? The water-repelling amino acids are water repelling because they are non-polar. In real life, if an enzyme uses an amino acid sequence having more than three or so water- repelling amino acids in a row, this will cause a strong tendency for the amino acid chain to aggregate with any other non-polar molecules near it. Think through the implications of this. Miller produced 100 times as many water-repelling amino acids as he did water-attracting ones. (By contrast enzymes in real life tend to be composed of roughly equal numbers of each kind.) This means in a sequence of 101 amino acids made randomly from the products of Miller’s experiment, there will tend to be 100 water repelling amino acids and only one water-attracting amino acid. This means that even if a long string of amino acids could be joined together using the products available from a scenario represented by Miller’s experiment, that they then would head straight for the tar goo. The ratios of amino acids Miller produced work against the possibility of anything truly useful being done with his products. The same is true of all similar experiments. This is a fatal characteristic. |