note: I changed the title of this article. This post logically fits in after part 4 in
the “Why I Believe Series”, but because the article which prompted this post
just came out, it is the 6th post in the series chronologically.
I’m
excited about an article
I just read online in Science Magazine. The article is about a team of really
smart scientists who have produced a type of bacteria with close to the
smallest possible DNA molecules needed for a free living, reproducing organism.
Why
would I be excited about something so weird and at first glance so irrelevant
to our lives?
As I
mentioned in a previous post, as an intellectual hobby I like to learn about how science
provides evidence which points to God.
This evidence is all around us, from atoms to galaxies. Perhaps the clearest and strongest evidence
is found in the amazing complexity, beauty, and wonder of living things.
Sadly,
many people have been blinded, or at least partly blinded, to the glory of God
as revealed in creation. They have been
blinded by the false narrative which claims that all living things were created
by unguided natural processes using only the laws of nature and random
chance. This article about a tiny new
bacteria provides strong evidence that natural processes alone could not have
created the first life on earth.
There
are many aspects of life which are difficult to explain by evolution. For example, the eye’s ability to “see” along
with a brain able to process complex visual information is incredible. The same is true of the ability of birds to
fly and the ability of people to learn and speak languages.
As
amazing as vision, flight, and language are, many scientists, both those who do
not believe in macroevolution and those who do, agree that the most difficult
problem for evolution is the appearance of the very first living cell.
The
theory of evolution was only designed to explain small, gradual changes in
life. After the discovery of DNA and how
it works, modern evolutionary theory attempted to explain all of life by
proposing that random changes in DNA occasionally produced lucky improvements
which could be passed on to future generations.
But for evolution to work at all, you have to have a biological system
capable of storing and passing on biological information to future generations. The ONLY system which can do this is the
cell. All life consists of living
cells. Scientists speculate about other
ways information might be stored and passed on without living cells, but so far
no one has actually found such a thing in nature or created such a thing in a
lab.
Many
scientists have theorized and written about the possibility of a “RNA world”
before the first cells where RNA molecules in a theoretical biotic soup stored
and passed on biological information. No
such thing has been found or produced, and there are strong reasons to
believe it can’t work. But, even if
something like that did exist, you eventually have to create the first cell
since ALL known life today consists of living cells.
As a
result, the more complex cells are, the harder it is for scientists to explain
how unguided evolution could have produced the first one. If you imagine that the smallest cells are
very simple (after all, they are very small), you might not have a hard time
imagining such a thing popping into existence by luck in a pond or next to a
hot spring or somewhere else on the ancient earth. But, if even the very simplest cell is
amazingly complex, this scenario becomes practically impossible.
How the New
Article Helps
Over
the last few decades, scientific knowledge about cells has increased
dramatically. This is due in part to
greatly improved methods for identifying the sequence of base pairs in DNA
molecules. Why is that important? Well, it turns out that the base pairs in DNA
molecules work almost exactly like binary code on your computer hard
drive. The base pairs form a code
language which controls a lot of what goes on in each cell. You can’t just put a random collection of 1s
and 0s into a computer operating system and expect it to work. Neither could a
random sequence of base pairs produce a functioning cell. The order of the pairs is essential.
Computer
code is made by intelligent minds. If
there was not an Intelligent Designer (God) providing information for the first
cell, where did it come from? The usual
answer from evolution is that the information in DNA came from a combination of
random changes and natural selection operating over time. It is much easier to imagine random changes
producing a short functional code than a long one. The shortest code in an actual free living
cell from nature belongs to a little guy named mycoplasma genatilium. (I say “free living” because there are weird
bacteria that can only live inside or attached to other bacteria or cells because
they depend on those cells for key functions, like having a cell wall). So how long is the DNA code of little mycoplasma genatilium?
Answer:
1,079,000 bp (base pairs)
That’s
huge. It is extremely difficult (to put it mildly) for evolutionists to explain
how such a long code could be randomly produced. Many scientists have speculated that perhaps
cells could have existed in the past with shorter, simpler DNA codes. While speculating is fun, doing the hard work
to find a minimal genome size is something else. Thankfully, a big team of hardworking
scientists have worked for quite a few years to do more than speculate. They have actually created a cell with a
smaller genome. And not just any smaller
genome. There are multiple lines of evidence
which indicate that they have created a cell which has approximately the
smallest genome possible which can support a free living, reproducing
cell. They started with little mycoplasma genatilium and, based on both
cell theory and practical experimentation, they eliminated nearly all the code
that can be eliminated. Their work is
impressive and may be very valuable for future cell research. So, how big is this “smallest possible”
genome?
Answer:
531, 000 bp
An Analogy: Writing
a Book with Detailed Instructions for a Robot to Build a Car
To
get a feel for how amazing 531,000 bp of information is, let’s imagine a book
written with detailed instructions telling a robot how to build a car. This imaginary robot can do anything a good
mechanic with a good set of tools and a garage can do except the robot cannot
think on its own (neither can a cell!). The robot will blindly follow your
instructions. Instructions like that would most likely be written in binary
computer code, but since it’s hard for most of us to relate to that, let’s
imagine that this robot reads plain English and so you write the instructions
in English. To simplify things we’ll
ignore capital letters, blank spaces, and punctuation.
In
order to compare the instructions for our imaginary robot to the instructions
stored in the DNA of the simplest cell, we need to answer a question: How many pages of instructions would be
equivalent to the amount of information stored in the cell with a minimal
genome?
The
DNA “alphabet” has only four chemical letters, represented by the letters
A,G,T, and C. Because English uses 26 letters and there are only four chemical
letters, comparing the information stored by a certain number of letters is a
bit tricky. If you do the math, it turns out that the equivalent amount of
information stored in 531,000 bp of DNA would take 226,000 English
letters. How many pages is that? Of course it depends on the page size, font
size, and spacing. I’m writing the first
draft of this blog post in MS Word on normal 8.5x11 paper, font size 11, single
spacing, with a space added between paragraphs.
It comes out to a little less than 3,000 letters per page. That means that the super tiny, simplest
possible cell contains the equivalent of about 75 pages of instructions written
in English.
At
first glance, 75 pages of instructions might not sound too difficult to
produce. But, here’s the catch. According to evolutionary theory, these
instructions cannot be produced by any intelligent being. And since there is no known organism simpler
than this tiny cell which could have reproduced itself, all the instructions
have to appear at once. The only
mechanism for doing this is arranging the letters by chance. Could that work?
Let’s
say that one of the many lines of instruction for your imaginary robot was:
Mount each tire on its lug bolts, then
place the lug nut on each lug bolt and tighten each nut.
That
sentence contains 75 letters, not including spaces. If 75 letters were just
randomly typed, what would be the probability of producing that exact sentence?
2675= 1.3 x 10106
The chances of producing that one line of instruction by
typing 75 random letters is 1 in 1.3x10106. That’s slightly more than 1 followed by 106
zeros. That number is so large I could
not use my scientific calculator to calculate it. This is far more than the number of atoms in
the entire earth, which is estimated
to be 1 x 1050. Now, if you
are a bit rusty at math you might make the mistake of thinking that 1 x10100
is twice as big as 1x1050.
That is really, really wrong. It
is 1x1050 times as big. In
other words, if you had as many planet earths as there are atoms in the earth,
and for every atom in all those planets combined you got one chance to randomly
type 75 letters, your chances of producing the line of instruction up above
would be about 1 in a million (divide 1.3x10106 by 1x10100
and you get 1.3 million).
But
hold on! We don’t need that exact
sentence. Any sentence with the same
meaning could work. Here are some
examples:
Put
each tire on the lug bolts, then put the lug nut on each lug bolt and tighten
each lug nut.
Mount the four tires on the lug bolts, then
put the lug nut on each lug bolt and tighten each lug nut.
Mount each tire on the lug bolts, then
place the lug nut on each lug bolt and tighten each lug nut.
Mount each tire on the lug bolts, then put the
lug nut on each lug bolt, tighten each lug nut.
Perhaps
we could come up with several thousand, or even tens of thousands, of sentences
that your robot could use successfully.
In the same way, there are more than one sequence of DNA letters which
can produce a protein capable of performing a given function. Imagine there were as many as a million
different sentences your robot could use as instructions to place the tires on
the car. Would that help? Sure, but not enough. The chances of producing any one of those one
million sentences by randomly typing the characters would still be something
like 1 in 1.3x10100. (This number would change a little with the
shorter sentences.)
Let
me put this in plain English. It is
absolutely impossible to produce even one relatively simple line of instruction
by randomly typing letters.
Impossible. Similar calculations
taking into account a lot of detail about chemistry have shown that it is also
practically impossible to produce a string of DNA letters which would produce a
functionally useful protein by randomly arranging those DNA letters.
Here’s
the kicker. The SIMPLEST reproducing
cell does not need just one line of instructions. It needs the equivalent of roughly 75 pages
of line by line instructions. And some
of those “lines” will be longer than 75 characters. This is because the
average protein length in bacteria is about 267 amino acids! It’s even longer in more complex forms of
life.
It Gets Worse (for
the evolutionist)
Even
if you had a usable 75 pages of instructions, you could not build your car
without a robot who can follow those instructions. The equivalent of the robot in the living
cell is a collection of very complex molecular machines made from proteins. These
machines “read” the DNA code and use it to manufacture proteins. (My previous
post includes links to two short animated videos showing some molecular
machines.) But where did these complex
machines come from? They were built by
the instructions contained in DNA. But
if the DNA needs the machines to be useful, and if the machines are built by the
DNA, how did the whole thing get started?
It’s a super massive chicken and egg problem!
And It Keeps
Getting Worse
While
scientists were able to construct a real live, reproducing cell with “only”
531,000bp, this cell is not the best model for what would be needed for the
first hypothetical cell to survive and multiply on earth. Why?
This experimental cell grows only in a rich growth medium in a lab. The
article in Science explains:
The work described here has been
conducted in medium that supplies virtually all the small molecules required
for life. A minimal genome determined under such permissive conditions should
reveal a core set of environment-independent functions that are necessary and
sufficient for life. Under less permissive conditions, we expect that
additional genes will be required.
This
admission takes nothing away from the accomplishment of these scientists. They were not trying to create the most
likely candidate for the first living cell, but rather the living cell with the
smallest possible genome. But for our
purposes, this means that in real life the first cell would probably have
needed a much larger genome to survive and multiply.
Going
back to our analogy, what the scientists did would be roughly the equivalent of
providing your robot with a lot of car parts already largely assembled. The robot does not have to build an
alternator or a battery or a crankshaft, it just has to install them. But the first cell would have had to build
most of it’s parts nearly from “scratch”.
In fact, even among naturally occurring cells, like the tiny mycoplasma genatilium, the cells with
the smallest genomes get a lot of help by using “preassembled parts”. That’s why you find mycoplasma genatilium living in the gut of mammals where the host
organism provides a lot of the needed molecules. A more complex form of bacteria like e. coli can assemble its own parts. How big is e. coli’s
genome? 4.6 million base pairs!
What about the
Cells in Your Body?
Up
to now, we have been talking about the very simplest cells. How many base pairs does your DNA have? Over 3
billion. Those three billion chemical
letters of code are found in every one of the approximately
37 trillion cells in your body! Based on our analogy, that means each cell
in your body contains roughly the equivalent of 423,000 pages of information.
At
some point it’s time to drop down on our knees and worship our amazing God who
created all this. God said to Job,
26 "Does the hawk take
flight by your wisdom and spread its wings toward the south?
27 Does the eagle soar at your
command and build its nest on high?
(Job 39:26-27 NIV)
Perhaps
if Job had been a 21st century molecular biologist, God would have
added,
Did you write the
DNA code for the first living cell?
Did you create its
amazing molecular machines?
Can you design 37
trillion cells into a body that can grow and think and see and sing and dance
and believe and kneel and . . . worship?
How great is our God!
This is part 6, you may find links to other posts in this "Why I Believe . . ." series below:
Blog Posts in
the “Why I Believe Enough to Keep Following Jesus” Series
Introduction
Note:
Part 2 includes a poem I wrote
Seeing Evidence of
God in Creation
Seeing Evidence in
the Bible
note: Yes, I’m aware that part 6 is out of
order. That happened due to an article I
read about scientific evidence for God that came out after I had written part 5
