The Case for a Creator (38 page)

“So instead of simulating a natural process, they interfered in order to get the outcome they wanted. And
that
,” Meyer concluded, “is intelligent design.”

Undoubtedly, obstacles to the formation of life on the primitive Earth would have been extremely formidable, even if the world were awash with an ocean of biological precursors. Still, is there
any
reasonable naturalistic route to life? Like a homicide detective rounding up the usual suspects, I decided to run down the three possible scenarios to see if any of them made sense.

SCENARIO #1: RANDOM CHANCE

I began with an observation. “I know that the idea of life forming by random chance is out of vogue right now among scientists,” I said.

Meyer agreed. “Virtually all origin-of-life experts have utterly rejected that approach,” he said with a wave of his hand.

“Even so, the idea is still very much alive at the popular level,” I pointed out. “For many college students who speculate about these things, chance is still the hero. They think if you let amino acids randomly interact over millions of years, life is somehow going to emerge.”

“Well, yes, it’s true that this scenario is still alive among people who don’t know all the facts, but there’s no merit to it,” Meyer replied.

“Imagine trying to generate even a simple book by throwing Scrabble letters onto the floor. Or imagine closing your eyes and picking Scrabble letters out of a bag. Are you going to produce
Hamlet
in anything like the time of the known universe? Even a simple protein molecule, or the gene to build that molecule, is so rich in information that the entire time since the Big Bang would not give you, as my colleague Bill Dembski likes to say, the ‘probabilistic resources’ you would need to generate that molecule by chance.”

“Even,” I asked, “if the first molecule had been much simpler than those today?”

“There’s a minimal complexity threshold,” he replied. “There’s a certain level of folding that a protein has to have, called tertiary structure, that is necessary for it to perform a function. You don’t get tertiary structure in a protein unless you have at least seventy-five amino acids or so. That may be conservative. Now consider what you’d need for a protein molecule to form by chance.

“First, you need the right bonds between the amino acids. Second, amino acids come in right-handed and left-handed versions, and you’ve got to get only left-handed ones. Third, the amino acids must link up in a specified sequence, like letters in a sentence.

“Run the odds of these things falling into place on their own and you find that the probabilities of forming a rather short functional protein at random would be one chance in a hundred thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. That’s a ten with 125 zeroes after it!

“And that would only be one protein molecule—a minimally complex cell would need between three hundred and five hundred protein molecules. Plus, all of this would have to be accomplished in a mere 100 million years, which is the approximate window of time between the Earth cooling and the first microfossils we’ve found.

“To suggest chance against those odds is really to invoke a naturalistic miracle. It’s a confession of ignorance. It’s another way of saying, ‘We don’t know.’ And since the 1960s, scientists, to their credit, have been very reluctant to say that chance played any significant role in the origin of DNA or proteins—even though, as you say, it’s still unfortunately a live option in popular thinking.”

SCENARIO #2: NATURAL SELECTION

Random chance might not account for the origin of life, but zoologist Richard Dawkins says that when natural selection acts on chance variations, then evolution is capable of scaling otherwise impossibly high peaks. In fact, that was the premise of his 1996 book
Climbing Mount Improbable
.

He suggested that a complex biological structure is like a sheer cliff that cannot be scaled in one big bound without intermediate stepping stones, as chance must do. People look at this towering peak and think evolutionary processes could never get them to the top.

The backside of that same mountain, however, has a gradual slope that makes for much easier climbing. This represents the Darwinian idea that nature provides small chance variations and then natural selection chooses the ones that are most advantageous. Over long periods of time, little changes accumulate into major differences. So while the mountain looks impossible to climb from the cliff side, it’s quite easy to scale via the smaller Darwinian steps of natural selection on the backside.
¹⁷

In light of that insight, I asked Meyer: “Can natural selection explain how evolution managed to scale the mountain of building the first living cell?”

“Whether natural selection really works at the level of biological evolution is open to debate, but it most certainly does not work at the level of
chemical
evolution, which tries to explain the origin of the first life from simpler chemicals,” Meyer replied. “As Theodosius Dobzhansky said, ‘Prebiological natural selection is a contradiction in terms.’ ”
¹⁸

“How so?” I asked.

“Darwinists admit that natural selection requires a self-replicating organism to work,” he explained. “Organisms reproduce, their offspring have variations, the ones that are better adapted to their environment survive better, and so those adaptations are preserved and passed on to the next generation.

“However, to have reproduction, there has to be cell division. And that presupposes the existence of information-rich DNA and proteins. But that’s the problem—those are the very things they’re trying to explain!

“In other words, you’ve got to have a self-replicating organism for Darwinian evolution to take place, but you can’t have a self-replicating organism until you have the information necessary in DNA, which is what you’re trying to explain in the first place. It’s like the guy who falls into a deep hole and realizes he needs a ladder to get out. So climbs out, goes home, gets a ladder, jumps back into the hole, and climbs out. It begs the question.”

I raised another possibility. “Maybe replication first began in a much simpler way and then natural selection was able to take over,” I said. “For example, some small viruses use RNA as their genetic material. RNA molecules are simpler than DNA, and they can also store information and even replicate. What about the so-called ‘RNA first hypothesis’ that says reproductive life originated in a realm that’s much less complex than DNA?”

“There’s a mountain of problems with that,” he said. “Just to cite a couple of them, the RNA molecule would need information to function, just as DNA would, and so we’re right back to the same problem of where the information came from. Also, for a single strand of RNA to replicate, there must be an identical RNA molecule close by. To have a reasonable chance of having two identical RNA molecules of the right length would require a library of ten billion billion billion billion billion billion RNA molecules—and that effectively rules out any chance origin of a primitive replicating system.”
¹⁹

Although popular for a while, the RNA theory has generated its share of skeptics. Evolutionist Robert Shapiro, a chemistry professor at New York University, said the idea at this point “must be considered either a speculation or a matter of faith.”
²⁰
Origin-of-life researcher Graham Cairns-Smith said the “many interesting and detailed experiments in this area” have only served to show that the theory is “highly implausible.”
²¹
As Jonathan Wells noted in my earlier interview with him, biochemist Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Center was even more blunt: “You have to build straw man upon straw man to get to the point where RNA is a viable first biomolecule.”
²²

Jay Roth, former professor of cell and molecular biology at the University of Connecticut and an expert in nucleic acids, said whether the original template for the first living system was RNA or DNA, the same problem exists. “Even reduced to the barest essentials,” he said, “this template must have been very complex indeed. For this template and this template alone, it appears it is reasonable at present to suggest the possibility of a creator.”
²³

SCENARIO #3: CHEMICAL AFFINITIES AND SELF-ORDERING

Meyer pointed out that by the early 1970s, most origin-of-life scientists had become disenchanted with the options of random chance and natural selection. As a result, some explored a third possibility: various self-organizational theories for the origin of information-bearing macromolecules.

For example, scientists theorized that chemical attractions may have caused DNA’s four-letter alphabet to self-assemble or that the natural affinities between amino acids prompted them to link together by themselves to create protein. When I broached these possibilities, Meyer’s response was to bring up a name I had already encountered during my investigation.

“One of the first advocates of this approach was Dean Kenyon, who coauthored the textbook
Biochemical Predestination
,” Meyer said. “The title tells it all. The idea was that the development of life was inevitable because the amino acids in proteins and the bases, or letters, in the DNA alphabet had self-ordering capacities that accounted for the origin of the information in these molecules.”

I already knew that Kenyon had repudiated the conclusions of his own book, declaring that “we have not the slightest chance of a chemical evolutionary origin for even the simplest of cells” and that intelligent design “made a great deal of sense, as it very closely matched the multiple discoveries in molecular biology.”
²⁴
Still, I wanted to consider the evidence for myself.

“How did this chemical attraction supposedly work?” I asked.

“We’ll use proteins as an example,” he said. “Remember, proteins are composed of a long line of amino acids. The hope was that there would be some forces of attraction between the amino acids that would cause them to line up the way they do and then fold so that the protein can perform the functions that keep a cell alive.”

I interrupted. “You have to admit that there are examples in nature where chemical attractions do result in a kind of self-ordering.”

“That’s right,” Meyer said. “Salt crystals are a good illustration. Chemical forces of attraction cause sodium ions, Na+, to bond with chloride ions, Cl–, in order to form highly ordered patterns within a crystal of salt. You get a nice sequence of Na and Cl repeating over and over again. So, yes, there are lots of cases in chemistry where bonding affinities of different elements will explain the origin of their molecular structure. Kenyon and others hoped this would be the case for proteins and DNA.”

“What turned out to be the problem?” I asked.

“As scientists did experiments, they found that amino acids didn’t demonstrate these bonding affinities,” Meyer replied.

“None at all?”

“There were some very, very slight affinities, but they don’t correlate to any of the known patterns of sequencing that we find in functional proteins. Obviously, that’s a major problem—but there was an even bigger theoretical difficulty. Information theorist Hubert Yockey and chemist Michael Polanyi raised a deeper issue: ‘What would happen if we
could
explain the sequencing in DNA and proteins as a result of self-organization properties? Wouldn’t we end up with something like a crystal of salt, where there’s merely a repetitive sequence?’ ”
²⁵

When I asked Meyer to elaborate, he said: “Consider the genetic information in DNA, which is spelled out by the chemical letters A, C, G, and T. Imagine every time you had an A, it would automatically attract a G. You’d just have a repetitive sequence: A-G-A-G-A-G-A-G. Would that give you a gene that could produce a protein? Absolutely not. Self-organization wouldn’t yield a genetic message, only a repetitive mantra.

“To convey information, you need irregularity in sequencing. Open any book; you won’t see the word ‘the’ repeating over and over and over. Instead, you have an irregular sequencing of letters. They convey information because they conform to a certain known independent pattern—that is, the rules of vocabulary and grammar. That’s what enables us to communicate—and that’s what needs to be explained in DNA. The four letters of its alphabet are also highly irregular while at the same time conforming to a functional requirement—that is, the correct arrangement of amino acids to create a working protein.

“Here’s an example. If you go north of here into Victoria Harbor in British Columbia, you’ll see a pattern on a hillside. As the ferry approaches, you’ll realize it’s a message: red and yellow flowers spell out WELCOME TO VICTORIA. That’s an example of an informational sequence.

“Notice you don’t have mere repetition—a W followed by an E, followed by another W and another E, and so on. Instead, there’s an irregular combination of letters that conform to an independent pattern or specific set of functional requirements—English vocabulary and grammar. So we immediately recognize this as informational. Whenever we encounter these two elements—irregularity that’s specified by a set of functional requirements, which is what we call ‘specified complexity’—we recognize this as information. And this kind of information is invariably the result of mind—not chance, not natural selection, and not self-organizational processes.”

“And this is the kind of information we find in DNA?” I asked.

“That’s correct. If all you had were repeating characters in DNA, the assembly instructions would merely tell amino acids to assemble in the same way over and over again. You wouldn’t be able to build all the many different kinds of protein molecules you need for a living cell to function. It would be like handing a person an instruction book for how to build an automobile, but all the book said was ‘the-the-the-the-the-the.’ You couldn’t hope to convey all the necessary information with that one-word vocabulary.