The Case for a Creator (37 page)

As for me, I wasn’t after blood in this interview; I was merely seeking straightforward answers to an issue that has befuddled origin-of-life scientists for the last five decades. Even though most Darwinists concede they are stumped on the question of how DNA and life itself came into existence,
¹⁰
they don’t like Meyer’s conclusions on the matter. I didn’t care much about that; my criterion was simple: what makes the most sense from a purely scientific perspective?

THE DNA-TO-DESIGN ARGUMENT

I began our discussion by reading Meyer a quote that I had encountered in my research and scribbled in my notes. “According to Bernd-Olaf Küppers, the author of
Information and the Origin of Life
, ‘The problem of the origin of life is clearly basically equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information,’ ”
¹¹
I said. “Do you agree with him?”

“Oh, absolutely, yes,” Meyer replied. “When I ask students what they would need to get their computer to perform a new function, they reply, ‘You have to give it new lines of code.’ The same principle is true in living organisms.

“If you want an organism to acquire a new function or structure, you have to provide information somewhere in the cell. You need instructions for how to build the cell’s important components, which are mostly proteins. And we know that DNA is the repository for a digital code containing the instructions for telling the cell’s machinery how to build proteins. Küppers recognized that this was a critical hurdle in explaining how life began: where did this genetic information come from?

“Think of making soup from a recipe. You can have all the ingredients on hand, but if you don’t know the proper proportions, or which items to add in what order, or how long to cook the concoction, you won’t get a soup that tastes very good.

“Well, a lot of people talk about the ‘prebiotic soup’—the chemicals that supposedly existed on the primitive Earth prior to life. Even if you had the right chemicals to create a living cell, you would also need information for how to arrange them in very specific configurations in order to perform biological functions. Ever since the 1950s and 1960s, biologists have recognized that the cell’s critical functions are usually performed by proteins, and proteins are the product of assembly instructions stored in DNA.”

“Let’s talk about DNA, then,” I said. “You’ve written that there’s a ‘DNA-to-design argument.’ What do you mean by that?”

Meyer removed a pair of gold-rimmed glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on as he began to give his answer. “Very simply,” he said, “I mean that the origin of information in DNA—which is necessary for life to begin—is best explained by an intelligent cause rather than any of the types of naturalistic causes that scientists typically use to explain biological phenomena.”

“When you talk about ‘information’ in DNA, what exactly do you mean?” I asked.

“We know from our experience that we can convey information with a twenty-six-letter alphabet, or twenty-two, or thirty—or even just two characters, like the zeros and ones used in the binary code in computers. One of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century was that DNA actually stores information—the detailed instructions for assembling proteins—in the form of a four-character digital code.

“The characters happen to be chemicals called
adenine
,
guanine
,
cytosine
, and
thymine
. Scientists represent them with the letters A, G, C, and T, and that’s appropriate because they function as alphabetic characters in the genetic text. Properly arranging those four ‘bases,’ as they’re called, will instruct the cell to build different sequences of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. Different arrangements of characters yields different sequences of amino acids.”

With that, Meyer decided to show me an illustration he often uses with college students. Reaching over to a desk drawer, he took out several oversized plastic snap-lock beads of the sort that young children play with. “It says on the box that these are for kids ages two to four, so this is advanced chemistry,” he joked.

He held up orange, green, blue, red, and purple beads of different shapes. “These represent the structure of a protein. Essentially, a protein is a long linear array of amino acids,” he said, snapping the beads together in a line. “Because of the forces between the amino acids, the proteins fold into very particular three-dimensional shapes,” he added as he bent and twisted the line of beads.

“These three-dimensional shapes are highly irregular, sort of like the teeth in a key, and they have a lock-key fit with other molecules in the cell. Often, the proteins will catalyze reactions, or they’ll form structural molecules, or linkers, or parts of the molecular machines that Michael Behe writes about. This specific three-dimensional shape, which allows proteins to perform a function, derives directly from the one-dimensional sequencing of amino acids.”

Then he pulled some of the beads apart and began rearranging their order. “If I were to switch a red one and a blue one, I’d be setting up a different combination of force interactions and the protein would fold completely differently. So the sequence of the amino acids is critical to getting the long chain to fold properly to form an actual functional protein. Wrong sequence, no folding—and the sequence of amino acids is unable to serve its function.

“Proteins, of course, are the key functional molecule in the cell; you can’t have life without them. Where do they come from? Well, that question forces a deeper issue—what’s the source of the assembly instructions in DNA that are responsible for the one-dimensional sequential arrangements of amino acids that create the three-dimensional shapes of proteins? Ultimately,” he emphasized, “the functional attributes of proteins derive from information stored in the DNA molecule.”

THE LIBRARY OF LIFE

I was fascinated by the process that Meyer had described. “What you’re saying is that DNA would be like a blueprint for how to build proteins,” I said, using an analogy I had heard many times before.

Meyer hesitated. “Actually, I don’t like the blueprint metaphor,” he said. “You see, there are probably other sources of information in the cell and in organisms. As important as DNA is, it doesn’t build everything. All it builds are the protein molecules, but they are only sub-units of larger structures that themselves are informatively arranged.”

“Then what’s a better analogy?” I asked.

“DNA is more like a library,” he said. “The organism accesses the information that it needs from DNA so it can build some of its critical components. And the library analogy is better because of its alphabetic nature. In DNA, there are long lines of A, C, G, and T’s that are precisely arranged in order to create protein structure and folding. To build one protein, you typically need 1,200 to 2,000 letters or bases—which is a lot of information.”

“And this raises the question again of the origin of that information,” I said.

“It’s not just that a question has been raised,” he insisted. “This issue has caused all naturalistic accounts of the origin of life to break down, because it’s
the
critical and foundational question. If you can’t explain where the information comes from, you haven’t explained life, because it’s the information that makes the molecules into something that actually functions.”

I asked, “What does the presence of information tell you?”

“I believe the presence of information in the cell is best explained by the activity of an intelligent agent,” he replied. “Bill Gates said, ‘DNA is like a software program, only much more complex than anything we’ve ever devised.’ That’s highly suggestive, because we know that at Microsoft, Gates uses intelligent programmers to produce software. Information theorist Henry Quastler said as far back as the 1960s that the ‘creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity.’ ”
¹²

“But we’re talking about something—the origin of information and life—that happened a long time ago,” I said. “How can scientists reconstruct what happened in the distant past?”

“By using a scientific principle of reasoning that’s called
uniformitarianism
,” Meyer replied. “This is the idea that our present knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships should guide our reconstruction of what caused something to arise in the past.”

“For example . . . ,” I said and paused, hoping to prompt an illustration that would help me follow him.

“For instance, let’s say you find a certain kind of ripple marks preserved from the ancient past in sedimentary strata. And let’s say that in the present day you see the same sort of ripple marks being formed in lake beds as the water evaporates. You can reasonably infer, then, using uniformitarian logic, that the ripple marks in the sedimentary strata were produced by a similar process.

“So let’s go back to DNA. Even the very simplest cell we study today, or find evidence of in the fossil record, requires information that is stored in DNA or some other information-carrier. And we know from our experience that information is habitually associated with conscious activity. Using uniformitarian logic, we can reconstruct the cause of that ancient information in the first cell as being the product of intelligence.”

As my mind tracked his line of reasoning, everything seemed to click into place—except one thing. “However,” I said, “there’s a caveat.”

Meyer cocked an eyebrow. “Like what?” he asked.

“All of that is true—unless you can find some better explanation.”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “You have to rule out other causes of the same effect. Origin-of-life scientists have looked at other possibilities for decades and, frankly, they’ve come up dry.”

Before we went any further, though, I needed to satisfy myself that the other major possible scenarios fall short of the intelligent design theory.

THE MISSING SOUP

In 1871, Charles Darwin wrote a letter in which he speculated that life might have originated when “a protein compound was chemically formed . . . in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc. present.”
¹³
A few years ago a scientist summarized the basic theory this way:

The first stage on the road to life is presumed to have been the build-up, by pure chemical synthetic processes occurring on the surface of the early Earth, of all the basic organic compounds necessary for the formation of a living cell. These are supposed to have accumulated in the primeval oceans, creating a nutrient broth, the so-called “prebiotic soup.” In certain specialized environments these organic compounds were assembled into large macromolecules, proteins and nucleic acids. Eventually, over millions of years, combinations of these macromolecules occurred which were then endowed with the property of self-reproduction. Then driven by natural selection ever more efficient and complex self-reproducing molecular systems evolved until finally the first simple cell system emerged.
¹⁴

“I hear scientists talk a lot about this prebiotic soup,” I said. “How much evidence is there that it actually existed?”

“That’s a very interesting issue,” he replied. “The answer is there isn’t any evidence.”

That’s highly significant, because most origin-of-life theories presuppose the existence of this ancient chemical ocean. “What do you mean, ‘there isn’t any’?”

“If this prebiotic soup had really existed,” Meyer explained, “it would have been rich in amino acids. Therefore, there would have been a lot of nitrogen, because amino acids are nitrogenous. So when we examine the earliest sediments of the Earth, we should find large deposits of nitrogen-rich minerals.”

That seemed logical to me. “What have scientists found?”

“Those deposits have never been located. In fact, Jim Brooks wrote in 1985 that ‘the nitrogen content of early organic matter is relatively low—just .015 percent.’ He said in
Origins of Life
: ‘From this we can be reasonably certain that there never was any substantial amount of ‘primitive soup’ on Earth when pre-Cambrian sediments were formed; if such a soup ever existed it was only for a brief period of time.’ ”
¹⁵

This was an astounding conclusion! “Don’t you find that surprising, since scientists routinely talk about the prebiotic soup as if it were a given?” I asked.

“Yes, certainly it’s surprising,” he replied. “Denton commented on this in
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
, when he said: ‘Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.’
¹⁶
And even if we were to assume that the prebiotic soup did exist, there would have been significant problems with cross-reactions.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take Stanley Miller’s origin-of-life experiment fifty years ago, when he tried to recreate the early Earth’s atmosphere and spark it with electricity. He managed to create two or three of the protein-forming amino acids out of the twenty-two that exist.”

I interrupted to let Meyer know that biologist Jonathan Wells had already told me how Miller’s experiment used an atmosphere that scientists now recognize was unrealistic, and that using the correct environment doesn’t yield any biologically relevant amino acids.

“That’s right,” Meyer continued. “What’s also interesting, however, is that Miller’s amino acids reacted very quickly with the other chemicals in the chamber, resulting in a brown sludge that’s not life-friendly at all. That’s what I mean by cross-reactions—even if amino acids existed in the theoretical prebiotic soup, they would have readily reacted with other chemicals. This would have been another tremendous barrier to the formation of life. The way that origin-of-life scientists have dealt with this in their experiments has been to remove these other chemicals in the hope that further reactions could take the experiment in a life-friendly direction.