Evolution Hopes You Don't Know Chemistry: The Problem of Control

Institute for Creation Research ^ | Aug, 2004 | Dr. Charles McCombs

[AQGeiger]

ping

[combat_boots]

"random order"

Physics also tend to move the universe toward order. I have read a couple papers on the liklihood of evolution as being anti-order.

[Michael_Michaelangelo]

Here's a recent discovery that suggests an intelligently designed process/function:

========================

Gymnastic Enzyme Acts Like Logic Gate

An enzyme named vinculin undergoes “drastic” conformational changes, reports William A. Weis in the July 29 issue of Nature.(1) Vinculin, with over a thousand amino acid links, is important at membrane junctions for transporting materials in and out of the cell. It helps cellular “glue” exit the membrane so that neighboring cells can adhere to one another, such as in epithelial tissues.

Weis reports on recent studies that show vinculin undergoes radical conformational changes during its action. It will only build the adhesive junction when the necessary components are in place. Nothing happens unless the participants are ready; “the binding energy of several partners is needed to overcome the thermodynamic and perhaps kinetic barriers to activation,” he says. “Viewed in this way, vinculin functions as a logical AND gate, in which binding of two partners is required to generate an output, in this case a stable multi-protein complex”(emphasis added). What’s more, this automatic regulation is essential for its function; it prevents inappropriate assembly if the amount of product is unstable.

(1)William A. Weis, “Cell biology: How to build a cell junction,” Nature 430, 513 - 515 (29 July 2004) doi:10.1038/430513a.

Logic, logic gates, regulation: this is the language of intelligent design. Each of the contacts formed during the “radical” conformational changes of this complicated enzyme is finely tuned to its substrates, and finely tuned to the concentration of ingredients in the cell. And these finely tuned contacts are determined by the specificity of the sequence of amino acids in this protein, each coded in another language—the language of DNA. At every step, this system only makes sense in the context of intelligent design.

There is no suggestion in this paper how vinculin’s specificity in adhesive junctions might have evolved. But in the latest ICR Impact article #374 (August 2004), organic chemist Dr. Charles McCombs provides very good reasons why unguided chemistry will never produce such functional complexity and specificity. Unguided chemicals will always follow the laws of (1) chemical stability; i.e., whether the components will react at all, (2) chemical reactivity, or how fast reactants will react, and (3) chemical selectivity, or where the components react. Working through these principles, he shows that amino acids will not join together without help, and even if they did, far more random, useless, nonfunctional polymers with damaging cross-reactions would result. The resulting chain would always form blindly according to the relative binding energies of the amino acids.

It takes an organic chemist careful guidance at each step to produce a functional enzyme. “Evolutionists say that nature is blind, has no goal, and no purpose, and yet precise selection at each step is necessary,” McCombs says. Chemicals cannot think, plan or organize themselves, he reminds us, yet Darwinians invoke a false logic that unguided processes yielded logical living systems, like this example with vinculin. The chemist remarks, “Evolutionists just hope you don’t know chemistry!”

Commentary and information compliments of Creation-Evolution Headlines

[Michael_Michaelangelo]

Ping

[Dan Evans]

bump

[eno_]

Physics also tend to move the universe toward order.

That's not the conventional view, but some, like Wolfram believe order can arise from random inputs. Creationists might not like the implications of that, however.

[headsonpikes]

AFAIAC, you creationist johnnies have not moved beyond the bogus 'The watch must have a watch-maker' argument.

Nothing new has been added in centuries - just bloviation and a squid-like ejection of ink 'designed' to obscure rather than inform.

Bloody waste of time.

[AQGeiger]

Yes, and that argument has always had logical problems. IIRC, the general line was that nothing arises out of nowhere, that it must have an origin. So clearly there must be a maker for all of life and non-life that clearly must have always existed without its own origin or that maker couldn't be the Almighty. The only problem is, the second sentence of the argument contradicts the first sentence.

Creationists have never let that sort of little problem get in their way from telling everyone else that they'll burn in eternal fire if they have the audacity to question the argument, though.

[PatrickHenry]

Not going to deploy the ping list for a purely creationist thread. Archival ping only. (Crevolist added to keywords.)

[RobFromGa]

bump for later

[Michael_Michaelangelo]

All that aside, this man needs to stick calculating the efficiency and viscosity of shampoo, and leave the high minded thinking to people with vision. Doctor's and Engineer's are nothing but highly paid technicians, and nothing more.

High minded, like yourself?

***Dr. Charles McCombs is a Ph.D. organic chemist trained in the methods of scientific investigation, and a scientist who has 20 chemical patents

[Southack]

To get "life" you have to first arrange acids and bases into one of millions of specific non-random sequences. This is akin to having a computer program comprised of 1's and 0's stored on disk.

Then you have to animate one of those above-mentioned non-random DNA sequences of acids and bases. This is like running your stored computer program through your CPU.

Math alone precludes the random sequencing of so much programming data/commands in the former, and no one knows to this day how to animate such DNA commands from scratch in the latter.

Thus, we have two intractable problems that are *not* explained by either random processes or evolutionary theory.

That doesn't necessarily mean that some as-yet-described version of Creationism is responsible for life, but what it does mean is that Evolution as it stands today is insufficient and that some new theory or variant on a theory will be required to advance our scientific progress to the next level.

5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires

[D Rider]

but some, like Wolfram believe order can arise from random inputs

Busted 2nd law Bump!

Basic laws of Thermodynamics:

• 1st Law : You can't win.
• 2nd Law: You can't even break even.
• 3rd Law: You can't get out of the game.

[ahayes]

Well, I hope the "high-minded" thinkers know how to punctuate and capitalize correctly.

[Michael_Michaelangelo]

If you're interested, there's a very technical but interesting debate going on at ARN regarding the 2nd law.

Debate

Enjoy!

[eno_]

Well, at least on the information side of things, Wolfram says you might be able to beat the house.

I could not finish his book, not because the math is too hard, which it isn't (one nice thing about going back to a clockwork universe), but the use of the personal pronouns was a little too thick.

[stremba]

These are not necessarily intractable problems for a random process arguement. The problem of the specific "program" for life can be explained by the hypothesis that many different arrangements of biomolecules existed at one time. These would have been randomly formed from the "chemical soup" present on the earth. One of these randomly formed arrangements would have eventually developed into the precursors of modern life. (Note that the theory of evolution has nothing to say about pre-biotic chemistry. It is only concerned with what happened after the first cell was created, formed from random processes, came to earth from space, etc.) I am not trying to say that this is what happened, just that this is a reasonable way that random processes could have resulted in life. As for how this sequence, once formed, was animated, I frankly have no clue. But neither do researchers in modern biology. Maybe it's just the pattern of hydrogen bonds that form when the correct sequence of amino acids and DNA nucleotides come together. (I am a chemist, so I am admittedly biased toward a chemical explanation). The point is that you can't claim that the animation of the DNA and amino acid sequence is incompatible with ANY reasonable theory, since this is a phenomenon that is not currently understood or well-defined.