- Godwin Cotter
- Apr 4
- 5 min read
There is an urban myth where an exam proctor notices a guy flipping a coin over and over again during an exam. After each toss, he carefully examines the resultant upwards landing face of the coin, determining whether it is heads or tails. Sometimes he marks up his exam booklet. The exam proctor asks what the young man is doing. He responds, "This section is True or False, I am just checking my answers." There are some irrepressible optimists who believe such a strategy will work and get you a 100% score. It's this type of optimistic enthusiasm that fills casinos, sells lottery tickets, and allows many to believe in abiogenesis. For some, the hope that there is no God is very powerful. John Lennon wrote a song about it: "Imagine there's no heaven". All the same, it's hard to imagine why knowledgeable scientists would accept such a thinly disguised fairytale that is molecules-to-cell chemical evolution. Those with an inquiring scientific mind and a modicum of study can't help but realize that accidental abiogenesis is a lie that would make a politician blush.
The much-fabled Miller-Urey experiment is really more of a proof that abiogenesis can't happen than it can. A series of sleights of hand trying to tell us that the amino acids necessary for life could arise spontaneously in an early Earth mud puddle. In preparing for the experiment, Miller and Urey removed all the air from the apparatus and then added a 2:2:1 ratio mixture of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen gas. This is a safety precaution because the aforementioned mixture is rocket fuel, and if there is oxygen left in the apparatus, it will explode. It is a major stretch to imply this is mimicking the atmosphere of the primordial Earth. But even with this heavy weighting of the dice, they need further sleights of hand. They operate a distillery apparatus 24-7 for one week. It has, like any home moonshine still, an evaporation stage, a condenser, and a trap. The reason it isn't immediately recognized as a distillation apparatus is that it has this odd sparking apparatus that is zapping the circulating gases continuously. For a great many reasons, this is not like an early Earth with a sleepy-paced evaporation, condensation, and the occasional electrical storm. If we came back down to earth, we would realize that randomness prevails, gases dissipate, end products disperse, and an equilibrium is reached. The experiment cannot pass itself off as an early Earth: it is a tightly enclosed system, with unrealistic ingredients and the event frequency dial turned up to the max.
In spite of all the cooking done with this lab, the end product is a set of junk molecules, biologically speaking. They produced only five of the 20 amino acids that make up the proteins in life. In more recent years, the amino acids count has been increased to ten, plus the power of assumptions is now used to explain away difficulties. I quote from the same Wikipedia article: While not all proteinogenic amino acids have been produced in spark discharge experiments, it is generally accepted that early life used a simpler set of prebiotically-available amino acids.
The paltry set of amino acids produced in the aforementioned experiment are in a racemic mixture. A racemic mixture means that the amino acids produced come in two forms called enantiomers, "right-handed" and "left-handed" versions. This is referred to as chirality. The two forms are chemical twins, one is the evil twin and one is the good twin, biologically speaking. All amino acids found in life are the left-handed or L versions.
The next step is polymerization, the linking of amino acids into a chain that eventually becomes a protein with 300 to 1000 amino acids. To link two amino acids together a peptide bond needs to be formed. A peptide bond is basically not going to happen spontaneously for reasons of high activation energy, and it is thermodynamically unfavorable: (entropy has to decrease and enthalpy has to increase). But evolution has always rested on converting an impossible event to a "maybe, just maybe" event, or it simply leaves the task of finding the solution to questions to future scientific discoveries. Darwin himself explained away the lack of transition fossils due to the incompleteness of the fossil record. Today, a century and a half later, we still haven't found many transition fossils, but that is another discussion.
So while knowing that aqueous conditions do not favor polymerization and the formation of peptide bonds, linking amino acids into proteins, but let's go with the "maybe, just maybe" molecules will align just when lightning happens to strike. Protein molecules range between 300 and 1000 amino acids, but let's take a lower-sized protein of 300 amino acids, so the most unlikely spontaneously forming peptide bonds only have to happen 300 times. Knowing how complex protein synthesis is within the cell, one realizes that it is impossible for it to happen by accident. the impossibility is difficult to quantify in mathematical terms. However, there is one design feature of proteins whose probability is a fairly easy calculation.
Let's return to our coin flipper taking a True and False test. Now, only each time the growing protein links up with a new amino acid, it has to randomly connect with the good twin from a racemic mixture, an equal pool of good and bad twins. The calculation of the likelihood of the coin flipper getting a perfect mark on a 300-question True and False test and an accidentally generated 300 amino acid protein having all left-handed amino acids is the same. The probability is one chance in 2 to the power of 300, which calculates to 2 with 90 zeros after it. That is more than the number of atoms in the known universe, calculated to be around 1 with 80 zeros after it.
In Exodus 8:19, by the time the third plague arrives, Egypt's magicians or the scientists of their day, advise the Pharaoh, "This is the finger of God." The formation of the first living cell from inorganic molecules is like an onion made up of innumerable layered impossibilities, and if you peel one layer off, it reveals another. The Miller-Urey experiment is celebrated; we tell each succeeding generation of its success in generating a few amino acids, but the marathon runner hasn't left the starting block. A simple yeast cell has 42 million proteins of 6000 different varieties, not to mention a cell membrane and organelles, etc. Now, if a scientist argues for the evolution of primitive cells to more diverse life forms, I may disagree with the idea, but acknowledge that it is an arguable position. But when it comes to the step from non-life to life, inorganic matter to living cells, it is hard to fathom how scientists of today cannot conclude, "This is the finger of God."
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