“Evidence for Creation” (Review) - Chapter 4 “Evidence from Life” (Part 2)
Picking up from where I left off from yesterday: “Evidence for Creation” (Review) - Chapter 4 “Evidence from Life” (Part 1)
DNA From a Higher Source
DeRosa spends several pages describing the wonder and miracle that we call DNA. Given all of its complexity, it’s length, its efficiency, its accuracy, and all in such a tiny size, it is truly a wonder of nature. But, here’s the thing. Even though I completely agree that God designed DNA, I take it one step further: I believe He may have designed the Evolutionary process through which DNA arose. To a Creation Scientist, the idea of that still leaves God out of the process, but nothing could be further from the truth. For God to design the system, I think it is obvious that He had to know what it was going to produce with it, which required Him to have the DNA design worked out already. Honestly, I have no idea why signs of intelligent design must exclude Evolution, when Evolution itself is just another part of the design.
Now, lest I be misunderstood, I do not feel ready to put forth an actual scientific argument for Intelligent Design. For me, it is a philosophical and religious belief, and I fear I must leave it at that.
Something else to consider is that if God designed the world in which DNA arose, should it be any surprise that secular scientists are able to perform experiments on DNA, and verify their theories with real results? For example, DNA testing is accepted in a court of law. If God’s design for producing DNA could not also allow crime labs to test it, then this wouldn’t be a very good design for a universe.
The reason I am discussing this is because I believe DeRosa shot himself in the foot earlier in his book, when he described the universe as too glorious and complicated for us to understand the formation of celestial bodies (“Evidence for Creation” (Review) - Chapter 2 “Evidence from the Heavens”). He completely overlooked the fact that we have thousands of stars at different states of life by which to model a typical star’s life. Still, when I read his description of DNA, I was tempted think that he had a point, that perhaps DNA was too complex to arise by any process other than direct divine fiat. But then I remembered that the life cycle of a star is equally mysterious to him. Though DeRosa’s statistics about the size and scale of the DNA molecule certainly speak to me about God, intellectual honesty requires that I consider the source of the argument.
Finally, the evolution model programmed by Glenn Morton, which I linked to yesterday, and the article I reported on the day before, “Where d’you get those peepers”, both suggest that the number of mutations necessary for life to evolve is far fewer than the complexity of life would suggest. One reason is because the world doesn’t conduct just one trial at a time… but billions. That has to count for something. For me, adding God just pushes it over the edge.
Statistically Impossible!
A simple protein must have at least 100 amino acids bonded together in a set sequence. There are twenty amino acids to choose from, and, assuming they were available in number, the probability for the formation of a protein molecule would be impossible. The probability comes out to a staggering chance of one out of 1.28 x 10^115. That is 1.28 with 113 zeroes… (Borel’s Law holds that any probability less than 1 out of 10^50 could not happen.)
…Given the criteria that not only do all 100 amino acids have a specific sequence, but they are all left-handed and all bonded on the left hand, the probability that this will occur works out to one in 1.28 X 10^175. This last calculation overwhelmingly demonstrates the massive problem evolution has in getting inert matter to form a protein.
Ian Musgrave’s article Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations responds to this argument, directly on point.
Problems with the creationists’ “it’s so improbable” calculations
1) They calculate the probability of the formation of a “modern” protein, or even a complete bacterium with all “modern” proteins, by random events. This is not the abiogenesis theory at all.
2) They assume that there is a fixed number of proteins, with fixed sequences for each protein, that are required for life.
3) They calculate the probability of sequential trials, rather than simultaneous trials.
4) They misunderstand what is meant by a probability calculation.
5) They seriously underestimate the number of functional enzymes/ribozymes present in a group of random sequences.
Let’s compare this with the excerpt above.
1) They calculate the probability of the formation of a “modern” protein
As you can see above, DeRosa is talking about the odds of randomly generating a modern protein. However, as Musgrave illustrates, that isn’t Evolution. Note in the following figure that many steps are required to evolve bacteria, and Musgrave left out several steps to keep it simple.
2) They assume that there is a fixed number of proteins, with fixed sequences for each protein, that are required for life.
DeRosa does not make this mistake.
3) They calculate the probability of sequential trials, rather than simultaneous trials.
4) They misunderstand what is meant by a probability calculation.
Musgrave addresses these together:
When someone tells us that some event has a one in a million chance of occurring, many of us expect that one million trials must be undergone before the said event turns up, but this is wrong… in the above examples we were examining sequential trials, as if there was only one protein/DNA/proto-replicator being assembled per trial. In fact there would be billions of simultaneous trials as the billions of building block molecules interacted in the oceans, or on the thousands of kilometers of shorelines that could provide catalytic surfaces or templates… could we ever get enough molecules to randomly assemble our first replicator in under half a billion years? Yes, one kilogram of the amino acid arginine has 2.85 x 1024 molecules in it (that’s well over a billion billion); a tonne of arginine has 2.85 x 1027 molecules. If you took a semi-trailer load of each amino acid and dumped it into a medium size lake, you would have enough molecules to generate our particular replicator in a few tens of years, given that you can make 55 amino acid long proteins in 1 to 2 weeks.
So how does this shape up with the prebiotic Earth? On the early Earth it is likely that the ocean had a volume of 1 x 1024 litres. Given an amino acid concentration of 1 x 10-6 M (a moderately dilute soup, see Chyba and Sagan 1992), then there are roughly 1 x 1050 potential starting chains, so that a fair number of efficient peptide ligases (about 1 x 1031) could be produced in a under a year, let alone a million years.
5) They seriously underestimate the number of functional enzymes/ribozymes present in a group of random sequences.
The idea is that the enzymes upon which life is based are not the only possible functioning sequences for supporting higher life forms. There are many more than what we actually find, and given the possibility of interchanging them without “life” breaking, it turns out that the enzymes that were generated are not the only set that would have worked.
Final Score: DeRosa 1; Musgrave 4.
I also recommend reading the following posts on Gorden J. Glover’s blog for some good discussions on this: Missed Opportunities? Part 2, where he discusses opportunities God had for making every living thing chemically unique… but then didn’t. Included are discussions on how many different amino acids and proteins that could theoretically form, and their chemical interchangeability based on shape.
I hope to conclude chapter 4 next time, as I continue on to DeRosa’s next section: Kind after Kind