| Creation Truth Outreach, Inc. Pamphlet |
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| Chapter 3. Sixteen Fatal Roadblocks against a Purely Natural Formation of Life. Fatal Roadblock Number 7. Odds against a useful sequence of links in a chain in a single try are astronomical. The sequence of chemicals used in making the long molecular chains used in living systems is critical. Yet, getting a suitable sequence in an origin-of-life scenario for a specifically required function using random processes is essentially impossible. This would be true even if all of the raw materials were available and in the right ratios—which they are not. Getting multiple chains sequenced properly becomes impossibly impossible. We observe from life that frequently a limited number of substitutions of amino acids can take place in an enzyme without destroying its effectiveness. Many introductory biochemistry textbooks will even take a simple enzyme such as cytochrome c and show its amino acid sequences for a number of different plants and animals.11 They like to claim that these differences represent evidences of chemical evolution. By contrast, I believe the observed variation simply represent instances of a Creator God showing His creativity, showing how many different ways He can accomplish the same task. That He chooses to make sequences closer for related organisms than for distant organisms can be a design choice, having the effects of displaying detailed orderliness and a certain organizational beauty in His creation. Anyway, it is well established that there are many possible ways to sequence amino acids to produce a desired enzyme shape. Of course, there are many, many more wrong ways than right ways to do a sequence properly. I would like to show how difficult it is to get a proper enzyme shape. To do this, I will make a number of concessions in favor of chemical evolution. We will see that even with these concessions, getting a proper enzyme sequence is impossible. We will assume that we do not need to make use of all twenty amino acids defined in the genetic code in order to make up an enzyme, but rather that we could make any desired enzyme using only 6 representative amino acids. Of course, this would not actually work; it is difficult to find a single enzyme of any significant size in a living system that does not use each of the twenty possible amino acids at least once. But, this assumption allows us to compensate for the potentially large number of different amino acid combinations that can be effective in producing a required enzyme shape and does this in a manner very generous to the evolutionists. We will need glycine. Glycine is specifically needed to make sharp bends in enzyme folds. We will want another non-polar amino acid so that water can push it towards the center of an enzyme in making a desired shape, such as alanine. We will want an uncharged polar enzyme such as serine. We will want an amino acid with a positive charge, such as lysine. We will want an amino acid with a negative charge, such as glutamic acid. We will want an amino acid with a sulfur atom, such as cytosine. These six amino acids represent basic categories of amino acids. For the purposes of the following calculations, we will assume that the only issue facing us is to get the an amino acid from the correct category into a particular location. Again, in real life, the situation is much more complicated and restrictive than this. For one thing, this small an assortment does not distinguish between and allow selection between amino acids which favor sheet forming versus coil forming. So, it is not nearly as restrictive as what is actually needed in real life. There is another, equally great problem. In order to make a specific enzyme, the various coils and sheets need to form a precise alignment with each other in order to produce an exact final, product shape. The task of forming coils and sheets from amino acid strings is actually not particularly difficult. A subset of the twenty-commonly used amino acids could easily form coils and sheets. However, the really difficult part in building an enzyme is in getting the coils and sheets to align with each other properly. This is the task which requires the wide variety of amino acids actually used in living systems. It is this characteristic which makes our concession of only one amino acid representing each category an unrealistic oversimplification of what would be needed in a real-life scenario. Continuing, though, how many possible amino acid sequences are possible with an enzyme made up of 101 instances of our six available amino acids? It is six times itself 101 times. This can be written in scientific notation as = 6^101 . This converts to 4 x 10^70. This is about the same number as what we showed in Fatal Roadblock Number Two, Early Termination. Since I wrote out the number of zeroes there, I will not do it here. However, the discussion on the significance of that number would also apply here. Actually, it would be impossible to form the string. Even these six minimal components were not available in Miller’s experiment. If you do not have any flour available, you cannot bake a cake. Enzymes speak a language of coils, sheets, and connecting loops. Six amino acids are not nearly enough to talk in that language. Yet, origin-of-life experiments cannot give us even these six amino acids to work with, even though they have a highly intelligent, well-educated biochemist exercising precise control over the proceedings, making sure everything possible favors success. In a wild, pre-life environment, such a biochemist doesn’t exist. A British scientist named Richard Dawkins wrote a book, the Blind Watchmaker, which discussed a process called cumulative selection. 12 It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss his book here. However, there are a number of fatal flaws in his model which makes it entirely irrelevant concerning a discussion of real-life issues. Some of these flaws are mentioned in passing in our discussion on Roadblocks 15. and 16. So, we have seen that the theoretical odds against getting a useful sequence of 101 amino acids selected was greater than 10^70. This number was based on having far fewer choices of amino acids than what are actually needed to form enzyme coils and sheets and loops. Therefore, a more realistic assortment of amino acids to choose from is needed. However, this would result in yet higher odds. Nonetheless, even the proposed assortment had too much variety in too high a concentration to be supplied by a realistic pre-life soup. So, apart from issues of early termination, spurious side chains, the laws of chemical equilibrium, etc., we still cannot properly sequence an enzyme in pre-life conditions. Notice, if we take into account the combined odds against getting an amino acid chain without termination, without cross linking, without chemical equilibrium problems, and with a valid sequence, the results are staggering. The calculated odds against success are now 10^1,212 (= 10^70 x 10^152 x 10^920 x 10^70). It becomes the combined weight of all of the arguments that becomes so formidable. These horrendous odds are simply the result of the combined effects of some of the more obvious difficulties against natural processes forming a tiny 100-amino acid enzyme. |