In Darwin's Doubt, Stephen C. Meyer relates an incident in 2000 at a meeting of prominent evolutionary scientists. A prominent Chinese paleontologist, J. Y. Chen, appeared to be going off script. "As a result, one professor in the audience asked Chen, almost as a warning, if he wasn't nervous about expressing his doubts about Darwinism so freely--especially given China's reputation for suppressing dissenting opinions. I remember Chen's wry smile as he answered. "In China," he said, "we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America, you can criticize the government, but not Darwin." (Meyer, 2013, p52)

Chemical evolution is train-wrecked by truth in three main ways. One is the impossible odds of proteins or DNA molecules having the correct sequencing of constituent parts. The odds are all so infinitesimally small as to be zero. They make buying the winning ticket in Lotto-Max a sure thing. We're not talking about a needle in a haystack or grain of sand on the seashore, but a single atom in the known universe. The infinite monkey theorem has to be invoked every step of the way.

The second mission impossible is for all the constituent parts of a cell's cytoplasm to spontaneously assemble themselves at exactly the same time within a spontaneously assembled cell membrane. A cell will die if it cannot maintain homeostasis, its internal environment. A dead cell may have almost all the same molecular machinery as a living version of itself, but something is unbalanced or broken, and the whole operation shuts down. For the first primordial cell spark itself from death to life, it needs to have all its ducks in a row, the right number of each of its proteins, a cell membrane, the DNA and RNA, and the list goes on. The complexity of cells is mind-boggling. A "simple" yeast cell was found to have 42 million protein molecules, which fell into 6000 different varieties.

The third main impossibility is the chemistry won't work. It is akin to a boulder rolling uphill on its own for both the rise in complexity and the rise in stored energy. Stop reading here to avoid a brief chemistry lesson if you wish. For any chemical reaction to proceed, it has to have energy that exceeds the activation energy. Reactant molecules generally have to collide at just the right angle at the right speed. This means high temperatures, all of which tend to break up structures rather than construct them. The cell gets around this with the aid of enzymes. These molecular machines provide a shortcut around the activation energy barrier making a reaction millions of times more favorable. They also utilize the cell's energy currency, ATP, to power a chemical reaction in the reverse direction it naturally tends towards. However, enzymes are complex proteins. They won't be available if the cell's DNA and molecular machinery are not already up and running. Neither will there be ATP coins available to power these chemical reactions. The enzymes catalyze basically all the chemical reactions in the cell, including those reactions that link amino acids into proteins. In a relatively simple bacterial cell, to manage the formation of peptide bonds to link amino acids together into a protein, following a code requires "106 distinct but functionally integrated proteins as well as several distinct types of RNA molecules (tRNAs, mRNAs, and rRNAs). This system includes the ribosome (consisting of fifty distinct protein parts), the twenty distinct tRNA synthetases, twenty distinct tRNA molecules all with their specific anticodons..., various other proteins, free-floating amino acids, ATP molecules (for energy), and last, but not least --information-rich mRNA transcripts for directing protein synthesis. ((The Signature In The Cell, Meyer, 2009, p305-6)

Of the chemical reactions to form the four basic building blocks of the cell, amino acids, sugars, nucleic acids and lipids, only amino acids have the faintest claim to accidentally being born. Even in the contrived Miller-Urey experiment, the minute biologically relevant molecules produced are drowned in junk molecules and contaminants. These amino acids were also in a racemic mixture of two stereoisomers, the right-handed twin being the evil one. Sugar molecules, the next building block, are much more complex and are impossible to produce in a lab from scratch. Let's try and picture the added level of complexity and stored energy. If the cell were to oxidize amino acids, it would only be able to produce 1 to 7 ATP molecules. The most common sugar, glucose, if oxidized, will yield 32 ATP molecules. Glucose has 16 different stereoisomers (molecules that have the same molecular formula and the same connectivity of atoms but differ in the three-dimensional orientations of their atoms in space). Of these 16 more-or-less identical molecules, only D-glucose is found in life (or is biologically relevant). The oxidation of a lipid molecule such as palmitric acid yields 129 ATP. The fatty acids component of lipids can easily have 10's of thousands of different isomers. For example, a C18 fatty acid can have over 1 billion possible forms. While some degree of flexibility in lipid structure might exist, there are specific structural features that are required for lipids to be functional within the complex environment of a living cell.  The ATP yield is a ballpark measure of how much of the enthalpy load is required to construct the molecule from scratch. Energy, like money, doesn't grow on trees, especially on a primordial earth. The ATP yield can also provide a very rough idea of the complexity of these molecules. No Miller-Urey type experiment, supposedly mimicking an early Earth environment, has produced even the tiniest concentration of sugars, nucleic acids or lipids. These molecules can't even be made intentionally in a modern lab using early Earth inorganic molecules.

Those who hold to chemical evolution producing the first cell from some dissolved gases in a puddle by blind chance have to hand out "Get Out of Impossibility Jail Free" cards, every step of the way, over and over again. This is not science; this is wishful thinking. We may applaud the efforts and determination of the evolutionary origin of life scientists. However, this task is not much different from the alchemists who tried to capture moonbeams to transform lead into gold.

Please check out the other comics on the FearoftheLordcomics  website:

Repentance                      The Refining Fire           The Christmas Present 

The NROP Glasses           The Rise of Nothing   God vs Man: Who made Who?

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