Nov 26, 2022 — CANADA (SUN) — A serial presentation of the book by author Harun Yahya.
Confessions Regarding the Dead-End of Molecular Evolution - Part Two
G.A. Kerkut, is an evolutionist and zoologist in the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry at University of Southampton:
The first assumption was that non-living things gave rise to living material. This is still just an assumption…. There is, however, little evidence in favor of biogenesis and as yet we have no indication that it can be performed….
David E. Green is an American biochemist at University of Wisconsin, Madison and Robert F. Goldberger is Professor Emeritus of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and former Provost of Columbia University:
The popular conception of primitive cells as the starting point for the origin of the species is really erroneous. There was nothing functionally primitive about such cells. They contained basically the same biochemical equipment as do their modern counterparts. [cxvi]
Prof. Dr. Ali Demirsoy is a biologist at Hacettepe University:
Complex cells never developed from primitive cells by a process of evolution. [cxvii]
Dr. Alfred G. Fisher, who is an evolutionist, mentions in the fossil section of Grolier multimedia encyclopedia:
Both the origin of life and the origin of the major groups of animals remain unknown. [cxviii]
Prof. Dr. Ali Demirsoy:
In fact, the probability of the random formation of a protein and a nucleic acid (DNA-RNA) is inconceivably small. The chances against the emergence of even a particular protein chain are astronomic. [cxix]
One of the most difficult stages to be explained in evolution is to scientifically explain how organelles and complex cells developed from these primitive creatures. No transitional form has been found between these two forms. One- and multicelled creatures carry all this complicated structure, and no creature or group has yet been found with organelles of a simpler construction in any way, or which are more primitive. In other words, the organelles carried forward have developed just as they are. They have no simple and primitive forms. [cxx]
The heart of the problem is how the mitochondria have acquired this feature, because attaining this feature by chance even by one individual, requires extreme probabilities that are incomprehensible. . . . The enzymes providing respiration and functioning as a catalyst in each step in a different form make up the core of the mechanism. A cell has to contain this enzyme sequence completely, otherwise it is meaningless. Here, despite being contrary to biological thought, in order to avoid a more dogmatic explanation or speculation, we have to accept, though reluctantly, that all the respiration enzymes completely existed in the cell before the cell first came in contact with oxygen. [cxxi]
However, there is a major problem here. Mitochondria use a fixed number of enzymes during the process of breaking (with oxygen). The absence of only one of these enzymes stops the functioning of the whole system. Besides, energy gain with oxygen does not seem to be a system which can proceed step by step. Only the complete system performs its function. That is why, instead of the step-by-step development to which we have adhered so far as a principle, we feel the urge to embrace the suggestion that, all the enzymes (Krebs enzyme) needed to perform the reactions of the mitochondria entered a cell all at once by coincidence or, were formed in that cell all at once. That is merely because those systems failing to use oxygen fully, in other words, those systems remaining in the intermediate level would disappear as soon as they react with oxygen. [cxxii]
Harold F. Blum is Professor of Biology at Princeton University:
The spontaneous formation of a polypeptide of the size of the smallest known proteins seems beyond all probability. [cxxiii]
Britannica Encyclopedia of Science, which is an outspoken defender of evolution, states that the amino acids of all living organisms on earth, and the building blocks of complex polymers such as proteins, have the same left-handed asymmetry. It adds that this is tantamount to tossing a coin a million times and always getting heads. The same encyclopedia states that it is impossible to understand why molecules become left-handed or right-handed, and that this choice is fascinatingly related to the origin of life on earth. [cxxiv]
Wendell R. Bird is the author of The Origin of Species Revisited:
This unique sequence represents a choice of one out of 102,000,000 alternative ways of arranging the bases! We are compelled to conclude that the origin of the first life was a unique event, which we cannot be discussed in terms of probability. [cxxv]
Evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson is Professor of Zoology at Columbia University:
Above the level of the virus, the simplest fully living unit is almost incredibly complex. It has become commonplace to speak of evolution from amoeba to man, as if the amoeba were the simple beginning of the process. On the contrary, if, as must almost necessarily be true, life arose as a simple molecular system, the progression from this state to that of the amoeba is at least as great as from amoeba to man. [cxxvi]
Prof. Michael Pitman is Chief Scientist of Australia and Foreign Secretary of the Australian Academy of Science:
Time is no help. Bio-molecules outside a living system tend to degrade with time, not build up. In most cases, a few days is all they would last. Time decomposes complex systems. If a large 'word' (a protein) or even a paragraph is generated by chance, time will operate to degrade it. The more time you allow, the less chance there is that fragmentary 'sense' will survive the chemical maelstrom of matter. [cxxvii]
Evolutionists' Confessions That DNA
Cannot Form by Chance
Mathematics has now proven that chance plays no role in the formation of the data encoded in DNA. The word "impossible" fails to do justice to the probability of just one of the 200,000 genes making up DNA forming by chance, let alone a DNA molecule consisting of billions of components.
Some evolutionists admit that such is the case:
Carly P. Haskins is an evolutionist biologist. The following is excerpted from an article published in American Scientist magazine:
But the most sweeping evolutionary questions at the level of biochemical genetics are still unanswered. How the genetic code first appeared and then evolved and, earlier even than that, how life itself originated on Earth remain for the future to resolve . . . . Did the code and the means of translating it appear simultaneously in evolution? It seems almost incredible that any such coincidence could have occurred, given the extraordinary complexities of both sides and the requirement that they be coordinated accurately for survival. By a pre-Darwinian (or a skeptic of evolution after Darwin) this puzzle would surely have been interpreted as the most powerful sort of evidence for special creation. [cxxviii]
Leslie E. Orgel is a senior fellow and researcher Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in San Diego:
We do not understand even the general features of the origin of the genetic code . . .
[It] is the most baffling aspect of the problem of the origins of life and a major conceptual or experimental breakthrough may be needed before we can make any substantial progress. [cxxix]
Paul Auger is an evolutionist and French scientist:
It is extremely improbable that proteins and nucleic acids, both of which are structurally complex, arose spontaneously in the same place at the same time. Yet it also seems impossible to have one without the other. And so, at first glance, one might have to conclude that life could never, in fact, have originated by chemical means. [cxxx]
Douglas R. Hofstadter Pulitzer Prize winner and Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Indiana University:
How a single egg cell divides to form so numerous differentiated cells, and the perfect natural communication and the cooperation between these cells top the events that amaze scientists. [cxxxi]
Francis Crick is the Nobel Prize-winning evolutionist geneticist who, together with James Watson, discovered DNA:
An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle. [cxxxii]
John Maddox is the former editor of Nature magazine:
It is disappointing that the origin of the genetic code is still as obscure as the origin of life itself. [cxxxiii]
Pierre Grassé is the renowned French evolutionist and zoologist:
Any living being possesses an enormous amount of "intelligence," very much more than is necessary to build the most magnificent of cathedrals. Today, this "intelligence" is called information, but it is still the same thing. It is not programmed as in a computer, but rather it is condensed on a molecular scale in the chromosomal DNA or in that of every other organelle in each cell. This "intelligence" is the sine qua non of life. Where does it come from? . . . This is a problem that concerns both biologists and philosophers, and, at present, science seems incapable of solving it. [cxxxiv]
Confessions Regarding the Impossibility
of the "RNA World" Thesis
In the 1970s, scientists realized that the gasses actually contained in the primeval Earth's atmosphere made protein synthesis impossible. This came as a grave blow to the theory of evolution, when the primeval atmosphere experiments conducted by evolutionists such as Miller, Fox and Ponnamperuma were proved to be totally invalid.
In the 1980s, therefore, evolutionists began looking elsewhere. As a result, the thesis of the RNA world was put forward by the chemist Walter Gilbert in 1986. He suggested that proteins did not form first, but rather the RNA molecule that carries protein data.
Billions of years ago, according to this scenario, an RNA molecule somehow capable of replicating itself came into being in a chance manner. Under the effect of environmental conditions, this RNA molecule subsequently began suddenly producing proteins. The need then arose to store these data in another molecule, and in some way, the DNA molecule was formed.
This scenario is difficult even to imagine, and every stage of it consists of a separate impossibility. Instead of explaining the origin of life, it actually expanded the problem and gave rise to a number of unanswerable questions. Since it's impossible to account for even one of the nucleotides making up RNA having formed by chance, how could nucleotides have come to make up RNA by combining in just the correct imaginary sequence?
Even if we assume that by coincidence, it somehow did, then with what awareness could this RNA, consisting of just one nucleotide chain, have decided to copy itself? And with what mechanism did it succeed in doing so? Where did it find the nucleotides it would need during the replication process?
Even if we assume that, no matter how impossible, all these things actually happened, they are still not enough to form a single protein molecule. Because RNA is merely data regarding protein structure; amino acids are the raw materials. Yet there is no mechanism here for producing proteins. To say that the existence of RNA is enough for the production of protein is no less ridiculous than saying that throwing the blueprint for a car onto the thousands of its components is enough for that car to eventually assemble itself— spontaneously.
There are no factories or workers around to let production take place. Even Jacques Monod, the Nobel Prize-winning French zoologist and fanatical adherent of evolution, states that it is impossible to reduce protein manufacture solely to the information contained in nucleic acid:
The code is meaningless unless translated. The modern cell's translating machinery consists of at least 50 macromolecular components, which are themselves coded in DNA: the code cannot be translated otherwise than by products of translation themselves. It is the modern expression of omne vivum ex ovo [Latin for "All that lives arises from an egg"] . When and how did this circle become closed? It is exceedingly difficult to imagine. [cxxxv]
Gerald Joyce is a researcher at The Scripps Research Institute, and Dr. Leslie Orgel is an evolutionist microbiologists at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in San Diego:
This discussion. . . has, in a sense, focused on a straw man: the myth of a self-replicating RNA molecule that arose de novo from a soup of random polynucleotides. Not only is such a notion unrealistic in light of our current understanding of prebiotic chemistry, but it would strain the credulity of even an optimist's view of RNA's catalytic potential. [cxxxvi]
Dr. Leslie Orgel:
This scenario could have occurred, we noted, if prebiotic RNA had two properties not evident today: A capacity to replicate without the help of proteins and an ability to catalyze every step of protein synthesis. [cxxxvii]
Manfred Eigen is a German biophysicist and former Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen:
One can safely assume that primordial routes of synthesis and differentiation provided minute concentrations of short sequences of nucleotides that would be recognized as 'correct' by the standards of today's biochemistry. [cxxxviii]
John Horgan is a writer for Scientific American magazine:
DNA cannot do its work, including forming more DNA, without the help of catalytic proteins, or enzymes. In short, proteins cannot form without DNA, but neither can DNA form without proteins. [cxxxix]
FOOTNOTES:
[cxvi] Green, David E., and Robert F. Goldberger, Molecular Insights into the Living Process, New York: Academic Press, 1967, p. 403.
[cxvii] Prof. Dr. Ali Demirsoy, Kalıtım ve Evrim
["Inheritance and Evolution"], Ankara: Meteksan Publications, p. 79.
[cxviii] http://www.icr.org/headlines/ darwinvindicated.html; "Was Darwin Really 'Vindicated'?", Frank Sherwin, Institute for Creation Research, April 30, 2001.
[cxix] Ali Demirsoy, Kalitim ve Evrim
["Inheritance and Evolution"], p. 39.
[cxx] Ibid, p. 79.
[cxxi] Ibid., p. 94.
[cxxii] Prof. Dr. Ali Demirsoy, The Basic Laws of Life: General Zoology, Volume 1, Section 1, Ankara, 1998, p. 578.
[cxxiii] W. R. Bird, The Origin of Species Revisited, p. 304.
[cxxiv] Fabbri Britannica Bilim Ansiklopedisi
["Fabbri Britannica Science Encyclopaedia"], Vol. 2, no. 22, p. 519.
[cxxv] W. R. Bird, The Origin of Species Revisited, p. 303.
[cxxvi] Michael Anthony Corey, Back to Darwin, Rowman and Littlefield, 1994, p. 32.
[cxxvii] Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution, p. 233.
[cxxviii] Caryl P. Haskins, "Advances and Challenges in Science in 1970," American Scientist, Vol. 59, May-June, 1971, p. 305.
[cxxix] Leslie E. Orgel, "Darwinism at the Very Beginning of Life," New Scientist, vol.94 (April 15, 1982), p. 151.
[cxxx] Paul Auger, De La Physique Theorique a la Biologie, 1970, p. 118.
[cxxxi] Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, New York: Vintage Books, 1980, p. 548.
[cxxxii] Francis Crick, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981, p. 88.
[cxxxiii] "The Genesis Code by Numbers," Nature, 367:111, January 1994.
[cxxxiv] Pierre P. Grassé, The Evolution of Living Organisms, 1977, p. 168.
[cxxxv] Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, New York, 1971, p. 143.
[cxxxvi] G.F. Joyce, L. E. Orgel, "Prospects for Understanding the Origin of the RNA World," In the RNA World, Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Laboratory Press, 1993, p. 13.
[cxxxvii] Leslie E. Orgel, "The Origin of Life on the Earth," Scientific American, October 1994, vol. 271, p. 78
[cxxxviii] Manfred Eigen, William Gardiner, Peter Schuster and Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch, "The Origin of Genetic Information," Scientific American, Vol. 244, (April 1981), p. 91.
[cxxxix] John Horgan, "In the Beginning," Scientific American, Vol. 264, February 1991, p. 119.
