Life - An Evidence For Creation
Evolution vs. Science
Summary from introduction
Life points to an intelligent designer in at least four ways:
- life is arranged as hierarchical independent systems - "irreducible complexity"
- disequilibrium of living systems - chemical reactions tend towards equilibrium, but equilibrium means nothing is happening, the cell would be dead.
- source for the biomolecules - These molecules to be formed chemically often require conditions that are mutually exclusive when looking at the formation of several different biomolecules.
- Another example often cited: chemical means of making biomolecules produce equal amounts of left and right handed molecules unless very difficult filtering is applied. Yet life processes only use one of the handed versions, and only produce one of the handed versions.
- Random aggregations of components are highly unlikely to produce any useful function. Functionality of complex systems typically depends on components which are pre-designed
Notes
Thinking about life's origin, we can walk on one of two mutually exclusive paths.
- Life on Earth could have been created by an extraterrestrial Creator, or
- it could have come into existence by a fortunate interplay of nature's forces.
Why do scientists seem to prefer mindless mechanism over the idea of a creator?
- Scientists are trained to believe that science can explain and solve any problem. This intrinsic optimism is essential to motivate scientists to wrestle new knowledge from the Unknown.
How does this create a problem?
- Scientists are at their best when they study repeatable phenomena. At present, no solar system is forming before our eyes. Even worse, we do not see natural forces producing living organisms from solely nonliving matter. Yet there are millions of lifeforms around us....
But it's worse than that. Most scientists are threatened by the idea of a creator...
- Most scientists regard the postulate that our world is here as a result of a Creation event as resorting to "magic" instead of a logical explanation — an abandonment of science.
But there is hope in a minority of scientists:
- minority holds that it is possible to accept this ancient report of Earth's creation at face value — and still be a true scientist
- Even more importantly, it can be shown that it is a logical conclusion that life itself is an actual evidence for creation.
Chapter 1: Is there such a thing as life
First evidence of intelligent design:
- An important aspect of the biosphere is that diverse orders of organisms support the existence of each other. This fact raises an important question: The mutual interdependence of organisms, as seen in the biosphere today, brings into question whether there ever was a time when only a single form of life existed.
How do we define life?
- after two centuries of dedicated study we still do not have a very satisfactory definition of life
Many forms of life are complex...
- Many forms of living matter exist as hierarchies of increasingly complex structures. Cells join to form tissues, tissues interact to fashion organs, and organs compose organisms. The term "life" has different technical meanings, depending on whether it refers to cells, organs or organisms. - An organism can die while it's organs still live, and are transplanted into another organism to continue living....
- Cells are the smallest unit of life, and the study of life should begin there.
- Genetics is important, since it is the blueprint that is given to new organisms
- As of the middle of 1999 the complete genomic structures of twenty-three organisms are available
- worldwide effort is underway, with the leadership of the United States, to determine the nucleotide sequence of the entire human genome, some 3 to 4 billion nucleotides long.
SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 1
- Life is not a freestanding entity. The only experience we have with life is in association with certain types of matter.
- Organisms in Earth's biosphere are mutually interdependent.
- It is becoming increasingly difficult to postulate the nature of the hypothetical evolutionary ancestor(s) of modern organisms in the light of the unexpected finding of similarities between certain thermophilic organisms and eukaryotes.
- The term "life" has different meanings, depending on whether it refers to organisms, organs or cells.
- A century of biological and biochemical research has propelled us into the golden age of biology.
Chapter 2:THE MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
What is the difference between living and inanimate matter?
It could be very difficult to design an experiment to prove if life exists elsewhere.
Do organisms like Viruses, prions, mycoplasmas, rickettsiae and chlamidiae ... bridge the chasm between living and nonliving, or are the differences between living and nonliving matter are in fact so great that this chasm cannot be spanned?
Viruses and prions are not alive, anymore than enzymes in detergent. They are completely dependent on the metabolic activity of the infected cell.
On the other hand, Rickettsiae, chlamidiae and mycoplasmas, on the other hand, are among the smallest known living organisms, and are very much alive. The fact that chlamidiae and rickettsiae are obligate intracellular parasites only means that they have serious metabolic deficiencies
So what makes one living, and the other not?
A clear distinction between living entities and nonliving substances is essential for a consideration of whether it is possible to go from one state to the other. For this reason we need to descend into the submicroscopic world of matter.
living cells are composed of lifeless, nonliving components Trying to analyze the components of life results in an analysis of non-living parts. Can't we just put them back together to create life? The implication is that the difference between life and death is a question of how biomatter is organized. Therefore, it should be possible to reverse the killing of cells by restoring them to their pre-disruption state. Unfortunately this still has not been achieved.
Chemical evolutionary issue has to answer two questions:
- 1) Is it conceivable that appropriate types of biomatter could have emerged on a hypothetical primordial earth; and
- 2) If these substances existed, could they have combined to form living matter?
Contrast between living and non-living matter:
- Non-living is often oxides, simple molecules (for example sand). Generally stable in the presence of oxygen, heat, and mechanical stress
- Living requires molecules with thousands or millions of atoms - proteins, DNA, polymers, etc. - with low oxygen content. In fact, when oxidized, they lose biological activity.
- Surrounded by a sea of oxygen, living matter continually fights the inroads of this element with oxygen-neutralizing mechanisms. Fragile biomolecules are easily degraded or deformed by heat or mechanical stress.
TABLE 2.1. Components of Escherichia coli Cells
| Component | Percent of Total Weight | Molecules Per Cell | Number of Different Kinds of Molecules | |
|---|
| Water | 70% | 24.3 billion | 1 |
| Proteins | 15% | 2.4 million approx. | 4,000 |
| Nucleic acids | 7% | 255 thousand | 660 |
| Polysaccharides | 3% | 1.4 million | 3 |
| Lipids | 2% | 22 million | 50-100 |
| Metabolic intermediates | 2% | many millions | 800 |
| Minerals | 1 | many millions | 10-30 |
The high water content of living matter prompted Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi to write: "we are a walking aquarium".5 We need all that water to enable most chemical transformations of life to take place.\
Bacteria can have their water removed which stops the biological activity. When the water is added back, they resume biological activity! The most remarkable aspect of this process is the reversibility of the life-processes by manipulating only the water content of the cells!
But for most polymers in the cell, the linkage between the simple repeating molecules is made by removing water links between them! Very significantly, all chemical linkages between the building blocks are created by dehydration. That is, the building blocks of all biopolymers are linked by splitting out water between them. ... It is a most difficult task to form new chemical bonds by eliminating water in an aqueous environment!
Proteins are composed of long strings of about 20 different amino acids, and the function of the protein depends on the order of the amino acids. This feature of biology is similar to a written language.
English has about 500,000 letter combinations that make sense. Another 500,000 nonsensical combinations could be developed. Are they useful though? Generally no.
Misspelling words jeopardizes their meaning. Likewise, for proteins to function properly their amino acids must follow each other in a correct order.8 For example, the oxygen-carrying component in our blood — hemoglobin — is built from 4 separate protein chains, each of which is a string of 142-146 amino acids.
What happens when a single amino acid is changed? Is it beneficial?
In an inherited illness called "sickle-cell anemia", the gene for one of the protein chains of hemoglobin sends out incorrect information to the protein-making complex. This results in placing a wrong amino acid in the sixth position of a specific sequence of the 146. This alteration is enough to lead to distortion of the red blood cell, to anemia, to many other problems, and, sadly, to death in many cases. While not all changes in amino-acid sequences have such drastic consequences, this somewhat extreme example underscores the importance of the correct order of amino acids for proteins.
But how does the protein-building apparatus know the correct amino-acid sequence for each of the thousands of different proteins found in the cell?
The answer is that the genes of each cell are libraries containing just such information.
- When the cell needs to make a certain type of protein, it sends a copy of its amino-acid sequence information to the protein-synthesizing complex.
- Bacteria, with a thousand different proteins, have a minimum of a thousand genes.
We can now sequence these genes, and understand what amino acids and proteins they code for.
TABLE 2.3. Distribution of Genes by Their Functions in Three Bacterial Cells - From this table it is seen that E. coli requires more than 1500 different proteins for growth. Most of these proteins are biocatalysts — "enzymes" — that promote specific chemical conversions.
What about the overall organization?
Matter is organized into successively more complex hierarchies in cells. The logical interdependency among cellular components in the vertical hierarchy parallels nicely the logical ties that connect letters with words, words with sentences, sentences with paragraphs, etc., all the way to the level of a completed manuscript.
However, in life, typos are deadly!
A crucial difference between biomatter and written material, however, is that the degree of tolerance for error is much smaller in biology.
- given the tight functional interdependence of its components from precursors and biopolymers, cells are in trouble with less than a full complement of all their parts.
The interdependence of the substances within the simplest cells creates Chicken and egg problems within the makeup of cells: Example: the manufacture of proteins requires nucleic acids and, conversely, nucleic acids cannot be made without proteins. This circular relationship between proteins and nucleic acids from a chemical evolutionary viewpoint resembles the classic "chicken and egg" problem.
SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 2
- Although there are many differences between living organisms and inanimate matter, in an unfamiliar setting it may be difficult to distinguish between them. On Earth the lines of demarcation between living organisms and inanimate matter are clear.
- The chemical makeup of living matter consists of large amounts of biopolymers and smaller amounts of metabolites in an aqueous setting.
- Living matter is organized into hierarchies, with the components being organizationally interdependent in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions.
Chapter 3: What makes a cell tick
Simply knowing the components of living matter is not enough to account for its biological activity. Living matter behaves differently than its isolated components. Examples:
- Living cells incorporate selected substances and utilize them either for energy or as building blocks for growth.
- Living cells secrete metabolic waste.
- Living cells grow and divide into daughter cells.
- Lastly, when cells recognize unfavorable environmental conditions, they make metabolic adjustments to preserve their existence
The problem we are faced with is that putting all the chemicals we find in cells into a bag doesn't result in life. Nothing happens. The system is in equilibrium.
Yet a living system maintains a similar ratio of components throughout it's life, called a "Steady state".
The difference between equilibrium and "steady state system": The significant difference between the two is the dynamic flux of matter through live cells.
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