The Case against Darwin - Evidence from Origins Science

 

Even larger difficulties arise with the evolutionary idea of life's beginnings. Charles Darwin and his contemporaries thought cells were rather simple, and that it would thus be feasible for chemicals in a "primordial soup" to come together and form one. However, through advances in biology, we now know that even a "simple" cell contains enough information to fill a hundred million pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Cells consist essentially of proteins; one cell has thousands of proteins, and proteins are in turn made of smaller building blocks called amino acids. Normally, chains of hundreds of amino acids compose a protein, and these amino acids must be in precise functional sequence.

According to the evolutionary scenario, then, how did the fi rst cell happen? Supposedly, amino E  acids formed in the primordial soup. Almost every high school biology text recounts Dr. Stanley Miller's famous experiment. In 1953, Miller, then a University of Chicago graduate student, assem­bled an apparatus in which he combined water with hydrogen, methane, and ammonia (proposed gases of the early Earth). He subjected the mixture to electric sparks. After a week, he discovered that some amino acids had formed in a trap in the system. Even though an ancient ocean would have lacked such an apparatus, evolutionists conjec­ture that in the primitive Earth, lightning (corre­ sponding to Miller's electridty) could have struck a similar array of chemicals and produced amino acids. Since millions of years were involved, even­tually they came, by chance, into the correct sequences. The first proteins were formed and hence the first cell.

But Sir Francis Crick, who shared a Nobel Prize for co-discovering DNA's structure, has pointed out how impossible that would be. He calculated that the probability of getting just one protein by chance would be one in ten to the power of 260-that's a one with 260 zeroes after it. To put this  in perspective, mathematicians usually consider anything with odds worse than one in 10 to the power of 50 to be, for practical purposes, impossi­ble. Thus chance couldn't produce even one pro­ tein-let alone the thousands most cells require.

And cells need more than proteins-they require the genetic code. A bacterium's genetic code is far more complex than the code for Windows 98.
Nobody thinks the program for Windows 98 could have arisen by chance (unless their hard drive blew recently).

But wait. Cells need more than the genetic code.

Like any language, it must be translated to be understood. Cells have devices which actually translate the code. To believe in evolution, we must believe that, by pure chance, the genetic code was created, and also by pure chance, translation devices arose which took this meaningless code and transformed it into something with meaning.

Evolutionists cannot argue that "natural selec­tion would have improved the odds." Natural selection operates in living things-here we are discussing dead chemicals that preceded life's beginning.

How could anything as complex as a cell arise by chance? A famous evolutionary argument dates to 1860, the year after publication of The Origin of Species. At Oxford University, "Darwin's bull­ dog" Thomas Huxley (whom we quoted earlier) engaged in a creation-evolution debate with the­ologian Samuel Wilberforce. There is no tran­script, but reportedly Huxley, in making his case for chance origins, said that six monkeys, poking randomly at typewriters, and given enough mil­ions of years, could write all the books in the British Museum. More than a century later, as a public school student, I heard a variation on that theme: "If a room ful of monkeys were to ran­domly clack at typewriters long enough, they would eventually recreate the complete works of Shakespeare. And if monkeys could recreate the complete works of Shakespeare by chance, then obviously a cell's information content could also arise by chance, if only given enough time."

However, anyone who believes these projections hasn't figured the math. What are the odds of a monkey typing one predetermined nine-letter word, such as "evolution"? We'll give Huxley a    break, and assume a typewriter with only letters, no other symbols. Obviously, the first letter, "e," would be a piece of cake. But to get "evolution," since the alphabet has 26 letters, one must multi­ply 26 by itself eight times. We find the monkey would need, on average, more than five trillion attempts just to write "evolution" once correctly.

Typing ten letters per minute, this would take over a million years. To get two consecutive predeter­mined nine-letter words-such as "evolution com­menced"-would take more than a billion billion years, taking us much further back than the Big Bang, which supposedly occurred some 15 billion years ago. In other words, if a monkey started typ­ing at the time of the Big Bang and continued until now, he couldn't even produce two consecutive preselected 9-letter words-let alone "the works of Shakespeare." If it is objected that the example had a room ful of monkeys, Dr. Duane Gish puts the monkey matter in perspective:

If one billion planets the size of the earth were covered eyeball-to-eyeball and elbow-to­ elbow with monkeys , and each monkey was seated at a typewriter (requiring about 10 square feet for each monkey, of the approxi­mately 10¹⁶ square feet available on each of the 10⁹ planets) , and each monkey typed a string of 100 letters every second for five billion years, the chances are overwhelming that not one of these monkeys would have typed the sentence correctly! Only 10⁴¹ tries could be made by all these monkeys in that five billion years . . . . There would not be the slightest chance that a single one of the 10²⁴ monkeys (a trillion tril­lion monkeys) would have typed a preselected sentence of 100 letters (such as "The subject of this Impact article is the naturalistic design of life on the earth under assumed primordial conditions") without a spelling error, even once.

Even if the correct chemicals did come together by chance, would that create a living cell? Throw­ing sugar, flour, oil and eggs on the floor doesn't give you a cake. Tossing together steel, rubber, glass and plastic doesn't give you a car. These end products require skillful engineering. How much more so, then, a living organism? Indeed, suppose we put a frog in a blender and turn it into puree?

All the ingredients for life would be there-but nothing living arises from it. Even scientists in a lab can't produce a living creature from chemicals.

How, then, could blind chance?

But let's say that somehow, by chance, a cell really formed in a primeval ocean, complete with all the necessary proteins, amino acids, genetic code, translation devices, a cell membrane, etc.
Presumably this first little cell would have been rather fragile and short-lived. But it must have been quite a cell-because within the span of its lifetime, it must have evolved the complete process of cellular reproduction. Otherwise, there never would have been another cell.
And where did sexual reproduction come from?

Male and female reproductive systems are quite different. Why would nature evolve a male repro­ductive system? Until it was fully functional, it would serve no purpose-and would still serve no purpose unless there was, conveniently available, a female reproductive system-which must also have arisen by chance. 

Furthermore, suppose there really were some basic organic compounds formed from the "primordial soup." If free oxygen was in the atmos­phere, it would oxidize many of those compounds -in other words, destroy them. To resolve this dilemma, evolutionists have long hypothesized that the Earth's ancient atmosphere had no free oxygen. For this reason, Stanley Miller did not include oxygen among the gases in his experiment.

However, geologists have now examined what they believe to be the Earth's oldest rocks and­ while finding no evidence for an amino acid-filled "primordial soup"-have concluded that the early Earth was probably rich in oxygen. But let's say the evolutionists are right-the early Earth had no free oxygen. Without oxygen, there would be no ozone, and without the ozone layer, we would receive a lethal dose of the sun's radiation in just 0.3 seconds. How could the fragile beginnings of life have survived in such an environment?

Although we have touched on just a few of the problems of "chemical evolution," we can see that the hypothesis is, at every step, effectively impos­sible. Yet today, even first-grade children are taught the "fact" that life began in the ancient ocean as a single cell-with the scientific obstacles almost never discussed.

Darwin's theory could also die on this informa­tion alone, but instead we'll just call it "strike two."

from the book The Case against Darwin by James Perloff