4. Simple Life Forms: an Oxymoron (2)

☼ Exhibit #5: Life Cannot Have Started by Chance.

Have you ever heard of an oxymoron? An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines two conflicting terms. Famous oxymorons are “jumbo shrimp,” “big details,” “larger half,” “civil war,” or terms more politically loaded like “military intelligence,” “Microsoft Works” and “civil libertarian,” or even a term like “Christian fiction.”

All above examples are good illustrations, but I personally have come to believe that one of the best oxymorons is the term simple living cell. That term just does not “compute”.  Even the most elementary one-cell living organism is orders of magnitude more complicated than anything mankind has even built or even imagined.

The simple one-cell organism at the beginning of the evolutionary chain does not appear to be such a simple organism after all. As an illustration, a single-cell organism could well be described as “a high-tech factory, complete with artificial language and decoding systems; central memory banks that store and retrieve impressive amounts of information; precision control systems that regulate the automatic assembly of components; proofreading and quality control mechanisms that safeguard against errors; assembly lines that use principles of prefabrication and modular construction; and a complete replication system that allows the organism to duplicate itself at bewildering speeds.”[2]

Or perhaps this is an even more illustrative description: “a living cell is like a robot factory, completely run by robots, that builds new robots who will build new robot factories.”

One "Simple" Living Cell.....

The simplest one-cell organism is far more complex than anything that man has ever been able to put together. In other words there is no such thing as a simple one-celled organism – the simplest cell ever known is extremely complex!

One of the most complex machines built by man is a modern airplane, like the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. It contains an estimated four to five million different parts. By ingeniously assembling all these four to five million non-flying parts together, the engineers at Boeing are able to build a machine that can fly. Look how that compares to a cell: A living cell consists of multiple billions of non-living parts (atoms and molecules). So a living cell is in the order of magnitude of one thousand times more complex than a modern airplane.

Molecular biology teaches us that the three basic components of every living cell are proteins, DNA, and molecular machines.

Building Proteins

Proteins are the molecules of structure and function. They are like the structural framing members (concrete, studs, sheetrock, joists and rafters) of a house. For instance, hair is mostly protein, skin cells are packed full of protein, and the enzymes that break down food are mostly proteins. Even the simplest living cell in our body or a single-cell living organism contains about 200 protein molecules.

Proteins themselves are built from amino acids. A protein molecule is actually a long chain of linked amino acids.  Amino acids are molecules build around (a number of) carbon atoms. One carbon molecule can bond four other (chains of) elements/molecules, each of these consists of other carbon links, or combinations of oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen. In nature there are 80 types of amino acids, however only 20 of these are found in living organisms. If any of the other 60 amino acids would be in the chain, it would actually make the protein not viable for use in a living organism. It takes about 100 or so correctly “selected” amino acids to assemble one protein molecule.

To make things more complex: amino acids come in equal amounts of so called right- and left-handed orientation (this has to do with how the other elements are bonded to the central carbon atom). So, any primordial soup would not only contain a random distribution of the 80 different amino acids, but also each amino acid would be present in a random distribution of right- and left- handed orientations.  For some, not yet scientifically understood reason, proteins found in viable living organisms only contain left-handed amino acids.

Can a protein form by chance? A calculation for the chance for one functional protein molecule to form randomly would be:

1/80 (select the right amino acid, one out of 80 possible choices) multiplied by ½ (only left-handed amino acids are usable) = 1 in 160.  This is the probability of selecting the correct first amino acid for the protein. This needs to be repeated 100 times, since there are about 100 amino acids required to assemble one protein molecule. This chance is: 1/160 times 1/160 times 1/160 times …….. 1/160 (one hundred times) = 1/160 to the power 100 = 2.6 x 10²²⁰ .

Compare this to the fact that there are only 10⁸⁰ atoms in the whole universe. And if you think that is does not matter that these chances or so small, because there is so much time to make it possible. Consider that – as per Big Bang cosmology – the universe is “only” about 15 billion years old, which is “only” about 4 x 10¹⁷ seconds. Therefore, all the available atoms in the universe combined with the total time the universe has existed by far does not give enough opportunity to statistically justify the random assembly of just one single protein molecule! Do you remember our previous illustration with the silver dollars?  It would require doing the “silver dollar experiment” about nine times successfully in a row simulate the probability of assembling a protein by mere coincidence.

And that still only give you one single protein molecule. For the simplest cell, you will need at least about 200 of these proteins molecules!

These chances are so small that even evolutionists do not believe anymore that any proteins have ever formed just by chance![3]

The Miller Experiment

But wait, how about the Miller experiment? Did not Stanley Miller show that if you have a “soup” of early earth materials and you add energy that the building blocks of life are spontaneously formed? Was proving that life can start by chance not one of the reasons for the Urey and Miller experiments?

The Miller Experiment

Indeed, in 1952, Stanley Miller, a graduate student in the chemistry department of the University of Chicago , conducted his famous spark-chamber experiment, the so called Miller-Urey experiment. After attending a lecture by Nobel laureate Harold Urey on the conditions on early earth, Miller decided to re-create those conditions in the lab. He connected water (“the ocean”) via glass tubing to a mixture of methane, ammonia and hydrogen, the chemicals supposedly present in early earth’s atmosphere. Using electrodes he simulated lightning. After a week, the water had turned yellow-brown and was coated with an oily scum. Analysis showed that the water contained glycine and other amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. With further improvement of the experiment Miller was ultimately able to produce small amounts of about half of the twenty amino acids required for building proteins.

Time Magazine, Life and many newspapers heralded Miller's achievement with headlines such as “Test Backs Theory That Life Began as Chemical Act.” But, of course, all Miller had done was synthesize a few amino acids. Bricks alone do not make a house, Like house bricks, the amino acids would have to be assembled in a very specific way before they become a protein.

Current scientific knowledge has revealed some serious problems with the Miller experiment. These give a clear indication about the complexity and improbability of the “building by chance” theories: [4]

• First of all: Miller “stacked the deck” in his spark-chamber. The “atmosphere” in his chamber was composed only of the “perfect” components selected to react the right way (ammonia, methane and hydrogen). Real earth’s atmosphere likely had only small, if any concentrations of those gases. Scientists now believe the early atmosphere was mainly composed of water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Those gases would not produce any reaction in the spark-chamber whatsoever.  Various evolutionary origin-of-life scientists confirm that Miller used the wrong gas mixture: “the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey simulation.” [5]
• Only 2% of the amino acids Miller made are potentially usable to build the proteins needed in a living cell. The rest is useless for life building and actually mostly destructive to any evolving life (as they tend to react more readily with the amino acids than the amino acids react with each other).
• Even the “right” molecules formed in the spark-chamber are far more likely to react in “wrong” than “right” ways with the other “right” molecules.

Even today, despite many, many efforts and dollars spent, modern science has not been able to get better results for creating “life in a test tube.” Now 50+ years after this “breakthrough in evolution science,” Miller’s spark-chamber only shows us, more than ever before, how extremely improbable (impossible is a better word) it is to create just a simple protein molecule by chance.

Actually the Miller-Urey experiment has backfired and has become a piece of evidence for the Creator model: it shows that if you leave the process just to chance it will not produce any workable results. Only if you stack the deck and control the results, you can produce (some) amino acids – that is applying “intelligent interference” – the concept behind the Creator model.