©2002 by Thomas F. Heinze
Reproduced by permission

As soon as a new protein molecule is made, while it is moving into its place in the cell, it folds into the right shape to connect and work with the proteins next to it. Some use the illustration of a hand in a glove to describe how a protein must fit. Others liken it to the way a key fits in a lock. Here is how it works:

"Comprising strings of amino acids that are joined like links of a chain, proteins fold into a highly complex, three-dimensional shape that determines their function. Any change in shape dramatically alters the function of a protein, and even the slightest change in the folding process can turn a desirable protein into a disease."¹

A number of scientists had a contest to see who would be first to come up with a computer model showing how to fold a protein correctly so it would fit with the neighboring proteins and function properly.

The next year they came together to see who had devised the best solution. The headline of the article in the Portland Oregonian was "Cell Wins, Scientists Lose." The conference decided that even with the computers we have now, it would take billions of years to solve this problem that the cell solves in a few seconds (a few minutes for the more complex proteins). About a year later, on December 6, 1999, IBM announced it was building the world's most powerful super computer to tackle the protein folding problem:

"The machine, dubbed Blue Gene, will be turned loose on a single problem. The computer will try to model the way a human protein folds into a particular shape that gives it its unique biological properties."²

It is because of the need for computational power to figure out how proteins fold that I have placed protein folding in the chapter on information.

The argument has been made that the composition of the protein determines the way it will fold. This is sometimes true, but if it were always true, there would be no need for a super computer to figure out how to fold them.

Specialized proteins called chaperones or chaperonins, have recently been discovered which move newly made proteins along to the places where they must fit with other proteins. On the way, they help them fold correctly and help fit them into their place. But what makes the chaperones themselves fold correctly? They too have chaperones.

Because our top scientists cannot yet fold proteins properly, few of the simple proteins which they can make in the world's most expensive laboratories will work in living things. Though they may be the same chemically, unless they fold correctly, they might as well be miniature spaghetti as far as biological activity is concerned!

Having understood the importance of a protein's shape, you can get a better grasp of an important concept that we have already studied. If a right-handed amino acid molecule is included among the all left-handed ones, a protein's shape is changed and it won't work. It's like a piece of a puzzle turned upside down with the bump sticking out on the wrong side. No matter how it folds, it will not attach correctly to the proteins around it.

Many believe that in the past, proteins formed spontaneously, fit together and functioned. This belief is probably held over from a time when the difficulties of protein folding were unknown.

When a protein is folded to fit so it will function correctly with the proteins next to it, it will only fit in one spot in the cell. How does it find its place?

"In the 1970's Blobel and his colleagues began pondering how proteins know their correct locations within cells. Even though proteins are confronted with billions of possibilities, they always know where to go. How?

An equivalent task would be to hover above a vast city - say, five times larger than New York - and then be able to whiz straight down to a tiny house on a tiny street somewhere in the middle of it."

In 1999, "The Nobel Prize for Medicine went to Dr. Guenter Blobel of The Rockefeller University in New York"⁴ for discovering the amino acid address tags that direct each protein to its proper place in the cell.

"He worked out the molecular details of how each signal is processed, and showed that the processes are universal, operating similarly in animal, plant, and yeast cells."⁵

The first cell could not function without a way to make proteins, fold them correctly, and attach address tags. Proteins made in the lab will not work until scientists master the problems of folding and addressing.

For a cell to work, it is not enough for its proteins to be folded correctly and be sent to the right places. The cell must also have the right amount of each protein. Therefore, protein production must be turned on and off at the right times.⁶ If a ribosome kept making more and more copies of any given protein, it would completely use up many of its raw materials. It's like the difference between burning the right amount of wood in your fireplace, and burning down the whole house. Also, if there was even one protein that the cell could not stop making after it had made enough, that cell would eventually be jammed so full of that protein it would die. If abiogenesis made the first cell, unless it included a control system, the new cell would have died after it started making the first protein and was unable to turn off the production when it had enough.

If a hypothetical first cell had been made, the initial quantities of each of its essential ingredients would have to have been close to perfect, and then kept that way. How could it have worked if it had been crammed full of:

• The proteins which were easiest to make?

• Any proteins at all whose production the cell was not yet programmed to turn off?

• Any proteins not called for in its program?

• Other unwanted chemicals?

The cell has a number of ways of turning protein production on or off. One is for a specific enzyme to attach itself to a spot on the protein. The enzyme may be very small, but it changes the shape of the protein a little bit, so it no longer fits precisely with the proteins around it.⁷ This makes it biologically inactive just as it would have been had it included a right-handed amino acid, or had it been folded improperly.

One of the most important methods of turning on or off protein production is by means of regulatory DNA sequences. They are specific stretches of DNA whose job is to tell the cell when to start and stop the production of a protein. However, the DNA cannot turn protein production on or off by itself. Each sequence works with a specific gene regulatory protein. The regulatory protein folds perfectly to fit the correct spot on the DNA, and work with it. Together, DNA and protein form a miniature control system; a switch that turns the correct gene or genes on or off at the right times.⁸

Neither the regulatory DNA sequences nor the regulatory proteins will work without the other, so it would seem that both should have been discarded by natural selection unless they both came into being perfectly coordinated at the moment the life of the cell began. At that same moment, of course, each regulatory protein also needed a fully functioning tag that would send it to the exact spot on the DNA where it would fit and function. On the way, it had to be folded correctly so it would fit when it got there. All must be in place for a cell to work.

Obviously, if the new cell did not have a functioning membrane in place at the same time, all these complex parts would just be loose goo floating away into the ocean. I ask atheists and agnostics, is your faith big enough to believe that all these complex substances that a cell requires to work, and the information to run them, just happened to come about at the same time with no Creator involved?

Stanley Miller became famous because of his experiment in 1953 which produced amino acids. It was imagined that amino acids would combine to form proteins which would get together with DNA to form the first cell. However, amino acids do not combine spontaneously to form proteins. Not even Miller accepts this idea today. In addition, DNA does not form outside of cells, not even in the laboratory. Some readers may still believe life formed because amino acids got together and made proteins, but Miller does not.

No one was there to see life form, so Miller and others have weighed the evidence, and have become convinced that amino acids do not get together to form proteins, nor does DNA form outside of already living cells and then get together with the proteins inside a cell membrane.

Because of that, Miller and many others now follow another suggested solution to the origin of life. They believe that RNA or a proposed simple forerunner of RNA, which is referred to as pre-RNA, must have been the key to the spontaneous generation of life. This idea is called the RNA world. Many scientists are now searching for evidence to substantiate this idea.

Because viruses are simpler than cells, some people once thought a virus might have been the first form of life. The idea was dropped because viruses can't live independently. They depend on cells for both nutrition and reproduction. It had been noticed, however, that some viruses only have RNA, a simpler system than that of cells, which have both DNA and RNA. This led to the idea that the precursor to the first cell might have been RNA.

Since RNA would be even more difficult to produce by chance than protein, many imagine there must have been a forerunner to RNA. They propose a simpler self-replicating material which they call pre-RNA. They believe it eventually evolved into what they call a simple RNA, which they believe had many of the properties of both RNA and DNA. Theorists believe that, like DNA, this simple substance contained all the cell's information and could make copies of itself. In addition, they believe the imagined simple substance could catalyze chemical reactions (make the reactions take place) much better than real RNA; well enough to produce proteins all by itself.

Here is the reason according to one schoolbook:

"Scientists have not been able to cause amino acids dissolved in water to join together to form proteins. The energy-requiring chemical reactions that join amino acids are reversible and do not occur spontaneously in water. However, most scientists no longer argue that the first proteins assembled spontaneously. Instead, they now propose that the initial macromolecules were composed of RNA, and that RNA later catalyzed the formation of proteins."⁹

This is a very significant admission. For the last two or three generations schoolbooks championed the belief that life began when protein and DNA were formed by chance in organic broth and got together. Since the evidence against this idea was generally not mentioned, some of you will have trouble believing that the protein-to-life idea was not right. What scientific evidence was offered for the amino acid to protein to living cell idea? Other than the first step, the formation of amino acids, to the best of my knowledge, there never was any. Now even schoolbooks agree that amino acids getting together to form proteins is false, even though it was taught to two generations.

While looking through some old books, I found one written by a creationist scientist in 1976 which discussed the same problem and came to the same conclusion as the schoolbook quoted above: proteins won't form in water.¹⁰ For many of the years that students were being turned away from their Creator by the idea that amino acids spontaneously produced proteins and got together with DNA to form the first cell, good evidence already existed that it was scientifically impossible.

I rejoice that the schoolbook quoted on the previous page now clearly admits that amino acids won't join together in water to form proteins but I am saddened that it fails to mention the fact that neither RNA (nor even the nucleotides of which RNA is made) will form in water either:

"…water greatly interferes with the linking of amino acids and nucleotides into chains, a crucial step in the origin of life. "¹¹

Did any real evidence exist for life having been formed without a Creator? If it did, why did the books claim that proteins formed in water, and got together with DNA to form life, when the evidence was strongly against this claim?

Many of you have seen this book on www.creationism.org as I was writing it, and have answered that the spontaneous formation of life is science, while what I believe is just religion. One person recently upheld the old argument that amino acids formed in nature would unite to form proteins which would get together with DNA to form a cell. He told me this was based on scientific observation and experimentation and could be verified. He said that what I believe is not scientific, but this is.

Clearly no one was there to observe how life was formed, so the idea that proteins formed in organic broth was not based on observation. The experimental evidence is strongly against the idea, as the correct amino acids have been put together in an organic broth many times, but no proteins will ever form. Most scientists are now convinced that life could not have started that way. Obviously the idea is not scientific, but he and millions of others are convinced it is. One of my goals in this book is to give a bit of balance in evaluating the evidence.

The scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicates that proteins will not form in nature. The schoolbook said that scientists "now propose that the initial macromolecules were composed of RNA," But the evidence is even stronger that RNA will not form outside of living cells. In addition, in order for life to begin in this way, before the first RNA decomposed it would have needed to produce other RNA (called "self replicating RNA"). No self replicating RNA has been found, and laboratories are not capable of making any, so those who will not accept a Creator are searching for a simple self replicating pre-RNA which could have evolved to a living cell.

So far, their experiments have failed to form any pre-RNA that will self replicate without continuing input from the scientist, but the search continues.

Davenport, a scientist with another theory evaluates the evidence for the RNA world:

"But where the first RNA came from is a mystery; it's hard to see how the chemicals on early Earth could have combined to form the complicated nucleotides that make up RNA."¹²

Davenport believes the evidence is against even the nucleotides of RNA or pre-RNA having been produced by a naturalistic method. He tells it like it is, because he has another idea. He suggests that life came from another chemical which would be easier to form. Since RNA, DNA, and proteins do exist in all living things, somewhere in the process, a great number of proteins and RNA would have to have formed many coordinated complex molecular machines. These machines would not work unless all their essential parts became present and assembled at the same time. Functional molecular machines do not just pop up. DNA contains the complex information that puts them together and makes them work. There is no real evidence that DNA was ever produced by RNA, as the RNA world proponents conclude, but had it been, it would have to have been programmed with all the necessary information to direct that specific cell. Did it get its program from RNA? Then where did RNA get it? No evidence exists that either matter or energy can produce meaningful information. The information that runs the cell must have been produced by an intelligent source.

Most atheists and agnostics hold their belief, at least in part, from having been taught that life resulted from proteins forming spontaneously in the ocean. Many were convinced that this was true science while the belief that God created life was unscientific. Now even schoolbooks admit that proteins won't form in water. If this is you, where will you now place your faith?

• In the RNA world, even though there is no evidence supporting it?

• In an intelligent Creator who could create both the materials and the information that directs them?

Many have accepted atheism or agnosticism as their religion, and defend it no matter how contrary it is to the evidence. Many of these folks are now reluctantly abandoning proteins and following the crowd to place their trust in the spontaneous generation of RNA. Some who before would have condemned as unscientific my skepticism of the protein to cell idea, have switched, and now write emails saying, "The RNA world is scientific fact. What the creationists believe is religion. Creationists hold to a religious faith. I am scientific." There is, however, no scientific evidence that a self replicating pre-RNA ever existed, nor can any be formed in the laboratory which will self replicate in a natural setting. Even if it could, the primary function of RNA is to contain information. The evidence indicates that the substances that hold information were made by the intelligence that gave them the information. They could not have survived without it.

After many years of trying in many laboratories, no one has been able to produce a satisfactory pre-RNA, and there is no evidence that any ever existed. In spite of that, Miller and many others have faith that it must have existed.

Even though the evidence is against the idea, textbooks today teach that life was started by RNA, just as older books taught that amino acid spontaneously formed protein which, together with the other essential ingredients, formed a cell. Some textbooks go so far as to use Miller's old experiment which produced amino acid to make the spontaneous origin of RNA sound easy and assured:

"First, RNA nucleotides formed from simple gas molecules in much the same way as in experiments similar to those done by Miller and Urey. Nucleotides then assembled spontaneously into small chains... These small chains were able to make copies of themselves. Once replicating molecules like these appear, natural selection and evolution are possible."¹³

It sounds scientific as you read it, but I cannot find one honest fact in the whole statement. Can you? Scientists have repeated the experiment many times since Miller, and in many variations. Some of the bases which nucleotides contain were formed, but no nucleotides. Though nucleotides break down spontaneously, they do not form from simple gas molecules, so they do not assemble spontaneously into small chains which can make copies of themselves. Neither RNA nor DNA can even be made in the lab.¹⁴

John Horgan, writing to a more scientific audience, is a little bit more up front about the difficulty of assembling RNA:

"RNA and its components are difficult to synthesize in a laboratory under the best of conditions, much less under plausible prebiotic ones."¹⁵

Orgel, one of the most important first life researchers, speaks of the problems:

"There were no chemical supply houses in the primitive earth. What's more, even if the ingredients had been present, the chemical steps needed to assemble them would have been difficult, if not impossible in the prebiotic world."¹⁶

Two astrobiologists take the admission of difficulty a step farther:

"The abiotic synthesis of RNA remains the most enigmatic step in the evolution of the first life, for no one has yet succeeded in creating RNA."¹⁷

("Abiotic synthesis of RNA," means making it outside of an already living cell).

Fry goes a step farther, and admits that not even the building blocks that make up RNA (nucleotides) are ever produced in nature outside of real live cells. Remember this quote from the section on coacervates?

"…other biochemical building blocks such as nucleotides and lipids, require for their synthesis a 'real factory.' …The synthesis of these substances involves a series of reactions, each reaction following the previous one in utmost accuracy."¹⁸

To make the formation of RNA or the theorized pre-RNA even more difficult, the presence of,

"…water greatly interferes with the linking of amino acids and nucleotides into chains, a crucial step in the origin of life."19

It gets worse! Remember that proteins will not function unless their amino acids are all left-handed? RNA and DNA will not work unless the sugars in their building blocks are exclusively right-handed:

"all sugars in the backbones of DNA and RNA are of the D, or right-handed type… copying can be achieved only when all the nucleotides are of the right-handed type."²⁰

In real life only already living cells are capable of producing all right-handed sugars. Sugars produced in nature are half right-handed and half left-handed, and could not have contributed to the formation of functional pre-RNA. Made up stories to the contrary are based on faith alone, and are contrary to the evidence.

Books that make RNA formation sound easy are simply not telling the truth. The problems in RNA formation are so numerous and so serious that many scientists are now searching for a more simple solution.²¹

Books that make RNA formation sound easy are simply not telling the truth. The problems in RNA formation are so numerous and so serious that many scientists are now searching for a more simple solution.

Most scientists, even those who do not believe there was a Creator, if pressed, must agree that both proteins and RNA are too complex to have been generated spontaneously. Because of this, many of them are searching for another way that life could have started. At the moment, many favor one of three proposed solutions which some believe might be possible. They defend their position by explaining why the other two would not work:

• Many are looking for a simplified RNA, something which contains information but also has the ability to self replicate, something known RNA can't do.

• Others, turning back toward the older protein solution, are trying to find a simpler substance that may have led up to proteins. They believe that the first steps toward life were chemicals that did not carry information.

• Still others find both solutions impossible, and are hoping to find life on another planet from which a living cell could somehow have come to earth.

Those of you who do not believe that God created life, have, for the most part, based your opinion, not on the idea of an RNA world, but on faith in the claim that life formed after amino acids had linked together to form proteins which then got together with DNA to form cells. Based on the evidence that in nature, amino acids do not link together to form proteins, the majority of evolutionists are now calling you to shift your faith to RNA²² which is even harder to form than protein.

"So far no RNA molecules that direct the replication of other RNA molecules have been identified in nature."²³

Have scientists been able to construct self replicating RNA?

"RNA can make new copies of itself only with a great deal of help from the scientist…"²⁴

Speculation about RNA replicating itself in nature is just that: speculation! DNA can reproduce because it comes in two identical strands that are separated with the help of proteins at the moment of reproduction. Then, with the help of other specialized proteins, each strand replaces its missing half using the half it still has as a template. RNA, on the other hand, is made by copying the information which is already "written" on short portions of a cell's DNA. This process requires the assistance of proteins, and RNA is normally a single strand which would be harder to replicate than a double strand like DNA which splits apart to reproduce.

If, however, self replicating pre-RNA could be formed, it would have to be programmed before it could function. It would be like a computer whose hard drive had no system and no program.

The questions remain:

• How could RNA or the proposed pre-RNA be formed outside of a cell? Remember how Wald grappled with the problem of how the production of living things would require a miracle, and suggested that two billion years were time enough to perform miracles? Others have also grappled with the problem that the evidence makes it quite clear that what is being asked for is scientifically impossible, and have tried to pull some other naturalistic miracle out of their hats. Some have suggested that clay or fool's gold would have served as a template to produce the first pre-RNA. Scientists have experimented with these substances to no avail. If, however, self replicating pre-RNA could be formed, it would have to be programmed before it could function. It would be like a computer whose hard drive had no system and no program. No clay template exists which could program pre-RNA to self replicate or to catalyze the chemical reactions that produce proteins. If one accepts the clay template idea, the question is no longer, "who programmed the pre-RNA?" It becomes, "who programmed the clay (or the fool's gold) which programmed the pre-RNA?" At whatever stage the programming was done, intelligence was required.

If pre-RNA did come about in some spontaneous way, unless it came into being already programmed with the correct information for making each necessary protein sequence, it would be of no more use in making proteins than a book of instructions with blank pages.

The purpose of DNA and RNA is to contain and pass on large quantities of complex information. Without the information, neither RNA nor the suggested pre-RNA, nor DNA would be of any use at all. The first part of the name "fool's gold" suggests the quality of the information clay or fool's gold would have been able to pass on to pre-RNA. Neither clay nor fool's gold can be forced to produce in the laboratory a pre-RNA which will self replicate in nature. Why should you have faith that outside of the lab, where it would have been much more difficult, they made pre-RNA, and passed on the instructions which enabled it to reproduce? The evidence is against it. Clay has no such information to pass on. If you choose to believe in clay as the programmer of life, you must believe it in spite of the evidence, not because of it. If you do not want to believe that God could create life, you can believe that clay did. You must believe in more or less the same miracle, but you can remain an atheist.

If pre-RNA could self replicate, when it evolved into real RNA it would have had to loose that ability because real RNA is not self-replicating. It is produced by copying information from a short section of DNA.

Top RNA world scientist Leslie Orgel noted that pre-RNA would have needed:

"…two properties not evident today, a capacity to replicate without the help of proteins, and an ability to catalyze each step of protein synthesis."²⁵

In nature, even DNA cannot replicate without the help of a good number of specialized proteins called enzymes. The enzymes divide the DNA into two strands, then make each strand into a complete DNA. DNA directs the making of RNA and furnishes its information. Orgel is saying that if RNA or a more simple pre-RNA came before DNA, it would have had to:

• Make copies of itself from the very beginning, and to have done so without any help from enzymes, a trick that neither DNA nor real RNA can perform.

• "Catalyze each step of protein synthesis." RNA can only catalyze a few of the steps with limited effectiveness. Enzymes are much more efficient at making chemical reactions happen than is RNA.

"Enzymes speed up reactions, often by a factor or a million or more… that is, they act as catalysts that permit cells to make or break covalent bonds at will… making life possible… Each type of enzyme is highly specific, catalyzing only a specific type of reaction."²⁶

"It is now generally accepted among biological scientists that for every biological reaction that has been discovered, there is, and for all those to be discovered in the future there will be, a specific catalyst to perform the task."²⁷

The imagined primitive pre-RNA would have had to catalyze not just one specific biological reaction as does each enzyme, but all of the reactions essential to life.

According to the RNA world hypothesis, enzymes would not have come into being until RNA had made them. In real life, DNA contains the information necessary to link in their correct order the amino acids to make each protein, including those that are to form the enzymes. If pre-RNA did come about in some spontaneous way, unless it came into being already programmed with the correct information for making each necessary protein sequence, it would be of no more use in making proteins than a book of instructions with blank pages.

Some kinds of RNA in living cells do have a limited ability to catalyze chemical reactions; that is, they can make some reactions happen. For example, because it receives the instructions from the DNA, one kind of RNA can cut the DNA strand. This is often used to imply that the suggested primitive pre-RNA could have made all of the proteins a cell must have to live. This is like bragging that since your husband can pick up a heavy sledgehammer, his grandfather could lift the Empire State Building. The fact that RNA can function a little bit as a catalyst is certainly no guarantee that a more primitive pre-RNA could, with no help from DNA, catalyze a lot.²⁸

Here is a recent high school textbook explanation:

"Perhaps RNA was the first self-replicating information-storage molecule. After it had formed, it could also have catalyzed the assembly of the first proteins…"²⁹

Perhaps if one could believe the first step he could also believe the second, but both steps must be taken by pure blind faith! RNA in nature can neither self replicate, nor catalyze the assembly of proteins, and years of research have not been able to give it those abilities. It would be just as scientific to say, "After it had formed, it could also jump over the moon."

Benner mentions another problem:

"Curiously, catalysis on the one hand and information storage on the other, place competing and contradictory demands on molecular structure that make a single molecule that does both difficult to find."³⁰

If there was a pre-RNA which was a whiz bang protein assembler, we would be faced with another problem. The number of useful proteins is much smaller than the huge number of proteins which would have been of no use at all. Did a mind guide the proposed pre-RNA to make just the right proteins? If not, and pre-RNA made proteins as they happened to come, Brig Clyce calculates that one protein in every ten to the 500th power would have been a possibly useful protein. If every cubic quarter inch of ocean produced 100 billion trials a minute, it would take hundreds of times longer than the 4.6 billion years which many believe to be the age of the earth, just to produce the first useful protein. Not just one, but at least hundreds of different useful proteins would have been needed. These would have to fold, fit, and function together.

In the time available, there is no way pre-RNA could have happened upon just the specific proteins that would be needed later in the first cell.³¹

Many atheists are becoming convinced that chance could never have produced proteins, DNA, nor RNA, so they are speculating it was done by natural selection.

At best, natural selection, the executioner of the unfit, eliminates organisms which are less able to live and reproduce, so the more fit survive to leave descendants. Some evolutionists, however, credit it with a creative ability and speculate that it did not just work on living things. In their imagination, they are pushing the effects of natural selection back from living things to ever more simple chemicals, and changing its function from weeding out the unfit to creating. They, like Wald, have seen the enormity of the evidence against the spontaneous formation of the complex chemicals of living things, and have searched for something that would provide the needed miracle.

The natural selection they are suggesting is not normal natural selection, but an imaginary natural selection that steps in and performs miracles when needed. Normal natural selection, if it applied to chemicals, it would favor those that are formed most easily, and those which break down most slowly. It would not have selected the many complex, extremely hard to form chemicals that would be needed to do a particular job in the future. RNA, DNA, proteins, and lipids are extremely difficult to form, and once formed, break down quite rapidly in the presence of water or heat. None form in nature, and most cannot even be made in the lab. If natural selection really did work on a chemical level, it would not choose these chemicals.

Real natural selection does not work on chemicals because chemicals cannot reproduce, so any chemical which was selected could not reproduce itself. The next chemical to pop up might be completely different. Natural selection works on organisms which have an information storage system, and are able to reproduce copies of themselves, after their own kind, but with some variation within the kind. Then, when the inferior ones are eliminated, those which remain continue to make copies of themselves.

Many evolutionists understand this and insist it was only after a self replicating information system was in place that natural selection could have begun. Otherwise there would have been no way to maintain any advances which might have been made. Chemicals put together by the random forces of nature are random, except that those easiest to produce are produced in greater numbers, and the very difficult are not produced at all.

If various self replicating pre-RNAs already existed, natural selection may or may not have been able to select the one that happened to reproduce itself better than the others, but it certainly could not invent or create the first pre-RNA, or empower pre-RNA to invent proteins. (The proposed pre-RNA is not protein but nucleic acid like RNA and DNA).

If pre-RNA could put together a protein capable of functioning as an enzyme, until that enzyme had been perfected enough to catalyze some needed reaction better than the pre-RNA itself, natural selection would eliminate the enzyme in favor of the catalyzing ability of the pre-RNA. The more successful pre-RNA might have been in accomplishing enzyme like activities, the more likely it would have been for natural selection to have chosen the pre-RNA itself rather than any primitive proteins it might be imagined to have produced.

Let me illustrate with antelope. Natural selection can choose an antelope that can outrun predators. Because the slower antelope are more apt to get eaten, the faster ones may leave more and faster offspring. That gives them no ability to make race cars, even though race cars are faster than antelope. This analogy helps us understand that even if natural selection could select for the pre-RNA which was faster at making some reaction happen, this would not give that pre-RNA the ability to make a new thing like an enzyme even though enzymes catalyze (make reactions happen) more rapidly than RNA.

Real RNA cannot have a part in making any protein at all unless it first copies the "blue print" of that protein from DNA. If primitive simple pre-RNA had the information for making all the proteins of the first cell stored within itself, its information storage capacity was far greater than that of real RNA.

Remember that the enzymes which the primitive pre-RNA is to have made are proteins and will not work unless they are folded correctly. At the time I am writing, they are building the super computer Blue Gene because no computer exists which is powerful enough to calculate how proteins fold. This is one more reason why the proposed simple pre-RNA would have required a much greater capacity to store information than real RNA. For pre-RNA to become real RNA later, this capacity would have to have been cut way back. Why would natural selection do that?

Summing up, those who believe in simple pre-RNA have faith that this suggested primitive molecule could:

• Replicate without the help of proteins. (Neither RNA nor DNA can do that.)

• Become capable of making many proteins (none of which would work unless it had been properly folded, addressed to the one spot in which it could connect properly, and carefully regulated as to the amount produced).

• Make DNA.

Real RNA comes in several varieties which work together. Here is what they do:

• Messenger RNA is a copy of a small protein-coding region of DNA that serves as a blueprint for a protein.

• Ribosomal RNA works with specialized proteins as part of a molecular machine that constructs proteins according to the instructions brought by the messenger RNA.

Those who have faith that pre-RNA made the RNA, proteins, and DNA of the first living cell do not base this belief on scientific evidence.

RNA is similar. The order of the bases determines the message, much like our messages depend on the order of the letters that make up our words. Like the letters in our words, the bases in DNA and RNA can be put together in any order. Their order is not determined by chemical preferences, but by the message, much like the shape of ink on a page.

Kerkut, a professor who taught evolution to graduate students back in 1960, wrote that several assumptions, none of which can be experimentally verified, form the General Theory of Evolution. I include the first two:

"1. Non-living things gave rise to living material, i.e., spontaneous generation occurred.

2. Spontaneous generation occurred only once."³²

He laid these points out very clearly because he was proposing a contrasting theory. He believed that life on earth had arisen from non-life several times, starting several different lines of plants and animals. (More recently, the punctuated equilibrium movement has given a different explanation for the same lack of transitional fossils between the basic groups of plants and animals). Kerkut's theory lost out when it was discovered that all forms of life on earth are based on DNA. Evolutionists concluded that they all must have evolved from one first cell, though the normal reason for this kind of similarity is intelligent design.

Kerkut was wrong in thinking that life started on several occasions, each of which evolved along separate lines. However, evolution from a common first cell does not go well with much of the evidence either. The Bible gives another possibility, which explains both the similarities and the lack of transitional fossils. It says God created a number of different categories of living things (Genesis 1:11-1:27) rather than one single first cell.

Similarities of design almost always exist when things are made by an intelligent designer. The first automobile had wheels and a motor, as do all automobiles today. Experts use similarities in design to distinguish a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright from one by Joe Blow, or to recognize paintings by a particular artist. This is a logical explanation for the fact that all living things have DNA. Similarity of design in no way proves that there was no designer, nor that evolution caused the similarities. The fact that motorcycles and automobiles both have wheels is an example. This fact is evidence that both are products of intelligent design, not that one evolved from the other. Whether one believes it came by design or accident, DNA is a recurring theme in living things. A schoolbook states:

"The genetic code is nearly universal. With few exceptions it is the same in all organisms. For example, the codon GUC codes for the amino acid valine in bacteria, in eagles, in dogs, and in your own cells."³³

A book written by evolutionists considering the possibility of life on other planets states:

"…there is a great deal of speculation among scientists about whether DNA is the only molecule on which life can be based or one of many. It is certainly the only one capable of replication and evolution on earth, and all life contains DNA."³⁴

Does all life contain DNA because it is so easy to make? Quite the contrary! The same authors state:

"No one has yet discovered how to combine various chemicals in a test tube and arrive at a DNA molecule."³⁵

"Some of the steps leading to the synthesis of DNA and RNA can be duplicated in the laboratory; others cannot."³⁶

Literature proposing the spontaneous formation of the first life usually does not make clear that DNA and RNA are so difficult to make that some of the steps can't even be done in the laboratory. The problems are often swept under the rug.

Another book comments on the code living things use:

"During the evolution of life on earth, the code was selected as the optimum mechanism for information transfer… and has never been changed or superseded. This provides a striking contrast with modern computer software, which is constantly being updated and superseded."³⁷

If it was indeed clay rather than the Creator that selected the optimum code for information transfer, and served as a template to pass it on to pre-RNA, I would like to hear some explanation as to how clay could do this.

Why are living cells able to make DNA, RNA, and many proteins? Every cell in your body or in any other living thing has a complete copy of the "instruction book" for that organism which tells how to make the components of each of its cells, and how they must operate. These instructions are found in the cell's DNA. They are written in a language using just four letters instead of 26 like English. Like the letters in a book, the nucleotide bases that serve as the letters in DNA can be arranged in any order. That allows DNA to carry whatever message.

It is easy to understand that almost anything can be written with a four-letter alphabet when we remember that computers work with only two, "off" and "on," sometimes called "0" and "1." Morse code transmits information with just dots and dashes. Anything we can write in English can also be written in code, or on computers. The same information can be transmitted in almost any language, using almost any kind of alphabet.

Since the "writing" of the DNA forms the rungs of the tiny DNA "ladder," we can think of it as a large number of little strips that follow one after another, somewhat like bar code. The letters, among other things, tell the cell the order in which amino acids should be linked together to make each protein the cell needs.

The information "written" in DNA is divided into "chapters" called genes. It was believed that each gene controlled the production of one protein:

"But we found that on average, each human gene seems to make about three different proteins."³⁸

The DNA itself is not made of amino acids or protein. Neither is the RNA which copies messages from the DNA and carries them where needed. DNA and RNA are made of nucleic acids; completely different substances than proteins. The relationship is more like that of a blue print to a building. The blue print is not made of the same substance as the building, even though it carries the complete plans for the building's construction.

The DNA itself is not made of amino acids or of protein. Neither is the RNA which copies messages from the DNA and carries them where needed. DNA and RNA are made of nucleic acids; completely different substances than proteins. The relationship is more like that of a blue print to a building. The blue print is not made of the same substance as the building, even though it carries the complete plans for the building's construction.

The big question is, "Where did the cell's 'blue print' come from?" It is written with DNA, but it is more than just nucleic acid, just as a blue print is more than just a rolled up piece of paper with light blue ink on it. Whether a blue print tells you how to build a skyscraper or a shed does not depend on the quality of the paper or the color of the ink, but on the information written on it. One stretch of nucleic acids on a strand of DNA will contain the information for making one or more proteins, while the next may not. An entire strand of DNA contains huge amounts of useful information coiled up in a microscopically small space. That undeniable fact brings us to our next, and perhaps most important question:

Can chance, matter, or energy compose information or does it always come from an intelligent source? To decide this, we need to agree on what information is. The principle definition of information in my dictionary is, "knowledge communicated or received..." The second is "knowledge gained through study…"³⁹ Philip Johnson explains how this applies to living things:

"By information, I mean a message that conveys meaning, such as a book of instructions…

Information is not matter, though it is imprinted on matter…

Instructions in the fertilized egg control embryonic development from the beginning, and direct it to a specific outcome… Similarly, the software in a computer employs natural processes to generate a word processing document, but the software has to be written by an intelligent agent."⁴⁰

The same information can be expressed in a great number of different kinds of codes. It can be stored, or transmitted as a message. All available evidence indicates that it takes intelligence to invent or create not only meaningful information, but also the alphabets, languages and codes that carry information.

DNA contains meaningful information in a code that can be stored, copied, transmitted, decoded, etc. The DNA of even the simplest cell directs the order in which hundreds of amino acids are strung together to form each of the many proteins a cell needs in order to survive. When one or a few amino acids are out of order, a protein will not work.

How could organic broth know the precise order of each of the amino acids for even one protein, let alone hundreds? The terms "soup" and "broth" refer to a random mixture. Many today pretend that organic broth or clay, or crystals of fool's gold somehow burped out a whole strand of DNA or pre-RNA, and it either came with the information necessary already in it, or with the ability to evolve the encoded information necessary to form not just one, but all of the complex proteins necessary for the first cell. The idea may be a central dogma of the faith of many, but it is certainly not science. It would be comparable to an accident dumping a truck full of old fashioned lead printing type onto the street so that the letters fell out in exactly the order of the letters in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

I write books, and for twelve years directed a publishing house. Could I have simply dipped paper in ink or organic broth and saved the trouble of writing, rewriting, correcting and rewriting? The quantity of information in even a very minimal cell is comparable to that of an encyclopedia. Where did information come from?

When authors propose that DNA evolved from chemicals, they often imply that the material containing the information would have determined the message. If the ultimate source was clay, why would the same clay have passed on the information for making many different proteins? The problem gets worse. The same four nucleotides (letters) code for all the different proteins. If, instead of coming from the clay, the message comes from the material of the DNA itself, the problem is much the same. Why doesn't it make all proteins the same?

The code is obviously determined by the arrangement of these four nucleotides in different orders. To get them into different intelligent sets of instructions requires that they be arranged by an intelligence. Some authors deny that fact to protect their religious or philosophical viewpoint that no intelligent Creator exists. They would be offended if someone told them that the information in their books had been produced by the paper of the book, with no intelligent author involved. At the same time, they claim that the much more complex information in the first cell did indeed come about with no intelligence involved.

Believing that DNA or an imaginary pre-RNA would accidentally come from organic broth or from clay with the correct instructions already on it is like believing the following fanciful explanation of how an encyclopedia could be made in nature: "A storm on the Nile ground up some of the papyrus reed that the ancients used to make paper. The waves deposited some of it on a flat rock where it dried. Now peel it off the rock. Look! It made a sheet of paper! The first encyclopedia must have been formed when a number of these sheets came together." That is like thinking up a story about how RNA could be formed in nature, and claiming to have explained the set of instructions which was written on it. Neither the paper, nor DNA, nor RNA determine the information that will be "written" on them. The author puts the letters in the correct order to transmit the message he chooses.

The material on which the message is written does not determine the message. My old Encyclopedia Britannica was on a CD. Now I consult a copy on the Internet.

Just as the same sheet of paper can be used to draw a comic strip or write a chemical formula, the same stretch of DNA that carries the commands for brown hair can just as easily hold the commands that will make blondes. Or teeth for that matter! DNA's information is real meaningful information. RNA makes copies of portions of it, but it has also been transcribed onto computers in the Human Genome Project, then printed out on paper. The information copied onto the computers carries the same information as the DNA from which it was copied.

Information has also been copied in the opposite direction. High school student Viviana Risca won a $100,000 scholarship from the Intel Science Talent Search for writing the words: "JUNE 6 INVASION: NORMANDY." Why the prize? She wrote them in DNA, using its chemical code!⁴¹ The same message that another person can scribble on a napkin at a restaurant or type into a computer, Viviana Risca and others have learned to "write" in DNA.

By a process called genetic engineering, small bits of information in DNA are now being altered by scientists to make plants that are resistant to bugs or freezing weather. Should we insult these scientists by saying, "That's nothing! Too bad you are not as smart as clay. It invented all the DNA instructions for a whole cell."

Professor Werner Gitt, who works in the field of information science writes:

"There is no known natural law through which matter can give rise to information, neither is there any physical process or material phenomenon known that can do this."⁴²

I believe this statement destroys the whole basis of the idea that no intelligent designer was involved in the formation of the first life.

If a language and letters or some other kind of code had already been provided, perhaps chance action could, if given enough tries, put a few letters together in a meaningful sentence. The first cell, however, had to have a huge carefully planned instruction book that could make and coordinate many complex substances. How did the "letters" of the nucleotides get into the correct order to code for the hundreds of precise proteins which were essential to the life of the first cell? If there had been no intellect involved, would they not have been in one of the millions of possible orders of nonsense gibberish?

Gitt writes that information is neither matter nor energy. It is another basic kind of thing that needs to be studied. He adds:

• "A code is a necessary prerequisite for establishing and storing information.
• Every choice of code must be well thought out beforehand in the conceptual stage.
• Devising a code is a creative mental process.
• Matter can be a carrier of codes but it can not generate any codes."⁴³

A few pages later he writes:

"…information cannot be a property of matter; it is always an intellectual construct."⁴⁴

If non-living matter could produce all the information necessary for life, we should see billions of examples of matter creating information. These are not observed.

Someone objected, "How about computers?"

Yes, they are non-living things that contain information, but they only contain information that intelligent people have programmed into them. I remember when people joked that computers with no system or program could be used only as anchors. Computers are lighter weight now, so unprogrammed computers don't even make good anchors any more. In large quantities, unprogrammed RNA or DNA might be useful as dog food, but they could certainly not direct the life of a cell.

A few who don't want to believe in an intelligent Creator have searched for a way to escape the obvious by claiming that no real information is associated with DNA. A Nobel Prize winning scientist destroys this argument:

"In all modern organisms, DNA contains in encrypted form the instructions for the manufacture of proteins. More specifically, encoded within DNA is the exact order in which amino acids, selected at each step from 20 distinct varieties should be strung together to form all of the organism's proteins."⁴⁵

Others claim that the amount of information depends only on the number of letters. They claim that if you add some random letters (nucleotide bases) instead of creating typographical errors, you have increased the information. The more letters, the more information. But not in the book they wrote! Neither does sprinkling ink here and there on a blank page produce meaningful information. Sprinkling ink on a page of text is even worse. The more ink is sprinkled, the more information is covered up. Random ink blots obliterate information, but add none. Those who claim that random marks on a page produce information are often grasping at straws, and purposely confusing static with message in an attempt to save their atheistic faith.

Scientists with the SETI institute are searching for messages from intelligent beings out in space using huge radio telescopes. (The letters "SETI" mean Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence.) They correctly state that intelligent messages are created only by intelligent beings. The first step in their search is to separate between static and message. So far all they have found is static, but if they find a message from space, they say they will have shown that there are intelligent beings out there. If there are exceptions in which intelligent messages are sent out without any intelligence involved, their whole search is meaningless.

With this in mind, think of DNA. Scientists have found it to be jam packed with intelligent information. This complex information got into the DNA somehow.

Dr. Charles Thaxton helps us understand how important it is to science that presuppositions not be permitted to override the evidence regarding the origin of DNA:

"If the inference for an intelligent cause for DNA (and for life too, if DNA is truly necessary for life) is in error, than we would likewise be in error to infer the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence upon receipt of intelligible radio messages from deep space. More important, our knowledge of past civilizations provided by archaeologists would be in jeopardy. These supposed "Artifacts" might be, after all, the result of unknown natural causes. Cave paintings, for example… may not be the result of early humans… Indeed, excavated ancient libraries could not be trusted to contain the works of intelligent men and women."⁴⁶

The fact that RNA contains a great deal of information and that DNA contains much more is evidence of an intelligent Creator, not that they were encoded by clay or organic soup, or by the blind forces of nature. Those who choose to believe the contrary hold to their faith in spite of the evidence, not because of it. The usual reason is that the non existence of a Creator forms a very important part of their world view. Some fear that if they abandon their belief that there is no Creator, their whole belief system may come tumbling down on their heads. If you have this fear, no matter how frightening it may seem, choose truth!

If you are tempted to ask, "Given enough time, couldn't the information of DNA or RNA just happen?" Remember, neither time, nor clay, nor the ocean, produce information. Therefore, more time would not produce more information. It is like asking, "How long would I have to leave my car motor running for it to produce an elephant?" It just does not happen.

Add the creation of information to the long list of things we have studied that cannot happen by chance. Information is produced by intelligence. The fact that DNA contains huge amounts of information is powerful evidence for a very intelligent Creator!

As we will see next, God put His signature on this aspect of His creation by packaging the information written with DNA in the most efficient way possible.

Evidence indicates that more information is crammed into less space in DNA than in anything else that exists! The question I am asking you is: If the first cell arose from chemicals without a Creator, how could it have come up with the most efficient container of information imaginable?

The journal Nature reported a computer-assisted search for the best ways of packaging things. It found the tight spiral form of DNA at the top of the list:

"Such questions of optimal packing are addressed by Maritan et. al. on page 287 of this issue. Some of the optimal shapes they find are the familiar, naturally occurring helical structures of proteins and DNA… Is this an insight or just a coincidence? We suspect it is the former."⁴⁷

What are the chances that a lucky accident provided cells with such an efficient shape for the molecules that contain their information? The fact that the DNA of even the most "primitive" cells is packaged in an optimal shape for efficient packaging is strong evidence that it was designed that way.

An information scientist speaks of a different aspect of DNA's efficiency. He says:

"DNA molecules contain the highest known packing density of information. This exceedingly brilliant storage method reaches the limit of the physically possible."⁴⁸

Summed up, the coiled shape of the DNA itself packs marvelously well, and the packing density of the information contained inside the DNA "reaches the limit of the physically possible."

Information does not get concentrated in a tiny space by accident. When scientists made the first computers they were huge machines, sometimes taking up whole buildings, but my laptop stores more information than those early computers. Getting computers small has been a long gradual process, and since their introduction, laptops have traditionally cost twice as much as desktop models with the same capacity. Why? Because the smaller the computer, the harder it is to produce. Does not the fact that DNA started out with the perfect solution for getting the greatest amount of information in the smallest space indicate that it had a very exceptional designer?

We can fit all the information from a whole set of encyclopedias onto one thin CD ROM to place in our computers, and much more on a DVD. That's a lot of information, but we are told that one gram of DNA can hold as much information as a trillion CDs. Whether "a trillion" is a precise number or well rounded, scientists have been inspired by the fantastic storage capacity of DNA.

In addition to its optimal design for information storage, the information in DNA is rapidly available, and is highly resistant to error.⁴⁹

It has been getting easier for us to understand what it means to cram lots of information into a small space. We can fit all the information from a whole set of encyclopedias onto one thin CD ROM to place in our computers, and much more on a DVD. That's a lot of information, but we are told that one gram of DNA can hold as much information as a trillion CDs. Whether "a trillion" is a precise number or well rounded, scientists have been inspired by the fantastic storage capacity of DNA. They are now trying to develop computers that use a molecular approach to overcome the limits of computer chips. If they eventually make a computer as small as a cell with a huge information storage capacity like DNA, and I scoff and claim: "You didn't do that! It just came about by accident," they will rightly consider me a fool. Yet many believe the people who claim that DNA itself was a lucky accident. The Bible says, "The fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God.'" (Psalm 53:1).

After a number of intelligent scientists had worked for many years developing ever better microfilm they fit the entire Bible on one 32 X 33 mm piece of microfilm. Amazing! However, that space covered with DNA would hold information equivalent to 7.7 million Bibles.⁵⁰ If the DNA really did form by accident as biology books often imply, why did it take generations of intelligent scientists thousands of man hours to develop the millions of times less efficient microfilm?

The idea that the random coming together of non-living chemicals produced the information of DNA is preposterous! Atheists, however, don't stop there. They add to that the belief that no intelligence was needed to produce and fill with information the most fantastically efficient tiny container known to man. I wish more Christians had that much faith!

The evidence clearly indicates that DNA was designed by a mind far more advanced than ours:

• Information comes only from minds.

• DNA was designed to contain information.

• All cells, even the most "primitive" contain DNA. This indicates that DNA did not gradually evolve, but has existed since living things were first created.

• The information packaging system of DNA is the smallest and most efficient possible. This is true not only of human DNA, but also of that in "primitive" cells. It is so tiny and efficient that scientists cannot yet reverse engineer it and make it in the laboratory. If after 100 more years of study they are able to, will this be evidence that it got into living things with no intelligence involved?

Everyday, people correctly distinguish between things that came about in a random fashion and objects that were designed by humans. They cannot only identify complex objects like jet liners as products of design, but also simple ones like Roman bricks. Many, however, by faith alone, attribute the most complex designs imaginable to mindless processes of nature. Otherwise they might believe in the Creator.