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404. Day 4 – Organic Evolution

On the Fourth Day of Evolution, organic life was created from non-organic minerals.

Question:

Can life come out of non-life?

How can you get from chemicals compounds to nucleic acids of nitrogen-containing bases joined by sugar-phosphate backbone by a random process?

How can a coding system create itself as RNA functions as an information carrier or code messenger?

Given:

  • The Theory of Evolution
  • The Laws of Nature

Theory of Evolution Position:

The Theory of Evolution asserts that the entire undirected, random, by chance processes of chemical evolution, natural selection and random mutations is fully capable of producing living systems out of non-living material.  How?

In a Quora article, “How did life on Earth begin?”  Richard Muller, Prof. Physics UC Berkeley answers the question:  “But how did we get from amino acids to RNA, the fundamental unit of advanced life,  is a complete mystery.

NASA answers questions at this link.  In the question: How did life begin and evolve on Earth, and has it evolved elsewhere in the Solar System?, we get the following answer: “Under­standing the processes that lead to life, however, is complicated by the actions of biology itself.

Scientific American has an article entitled, “How Did Life Begin?” with the following answer:   “Today the question of how chemistry on the infant Earth gave rise to RNA and to RNA-based cells is the central question of origin-of-life research.

Law of Science Position:

Consider the following Laws of Nature and my summary of their application:

  • Law of Cause and Effect – The noticed effect must have a proportional cause.
  • Law of Information – Information cannot be created without intelligence that understands encoding, the code, and the decoding.  DNA is a code.  RNA is the messenger.

Discussion:

For living systems to appear, more than chemicals are necessary.  Creation of life means that the simplest living cell had to appear.   “Organic Evolution” seemed very simple in 1859 when Darwin wrote Origin of Species because all you needed was a “glob of plasma”, a few simple chemical reactions and poof – life began.

As biologist gradually learned more about the complexity of the cell, the Theory of Evolution need more sophisticated theory to explain how organized life came out of a batch of chemicals. See How Stuff Works to understand the complexity of a simple cell.

In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick made a startling discovery inside the simple living cell called DNA.   The structure of DNA allows it to store information using a four letter digital code.  The DNA is a molecule.  The arrangement of these four codes are the instructions, language, or code for the cell.  It is your genes.   Your digital information.

Simply put the DNA is everything your body is and will be.   Every cell reproduces itself from digital instructions.   Bill Gates is quoted on comparing DNA to the machine code of a computer.  Besides layers of digital encoding, decoding and data storage;  there is error detection, error correction and repair; and besides that there is reproduction.

Another hurdle for biological evolution is replication.  You have to have cell self-replication to get biological evolution; something totally foreign to the evolution of the universe.  But if there is no evolution in the beginning cell, how did self-replication come about?  If you don’t start with a cell that is good at self-replication, you can’t evolve it.

A) Law of Cause and Effect

Any theory of science must conform to other theories and show the cause of the effect we see.  The Theory of Evolution must show HOW the cell came into existence.  It must show HOW the complex genetic code came into existence.

The information on your computer screen can be traced back to programs with organized information known as machine code.   How did that machine code get there?  What is the cause of the effect we see as machine code?  What caused all of the machine code information to be in this one spot with this much information?  The cause is users with intent and purpose.

Using the same logic, the organization of your body can be traced back to organized information known as DNA.  How did the DNA code get there?  What caused all of the DNA structure to be in this one spot with the amount of information to construct your body?  Evolutionist have to answer this question.  What is the force or mechanism that made this happen?

Explaining how the simplest living cell got DNA and all of the other complexities by saying it just happened is the same as telling me that the first computer and its program just happened.   That is religion.  Science is that things don’t just happen.  Everything has a cause, now that is science.

B)  Law of Information

In summary, the Law of Information came into its own and solidified with the creation of computers and programs or information systems that run them.  I learned this the hard way as my structural engineering professor refused to accept my blaming the computer program for the bad results.

Have you ever heard the saying “garbage in – garbage out”?   (Health side bar – “you are what you eat”?)

The Law of Information boils down to: all information came from a purposed intent.

Either the computer program 1) just happened or 2) it was put there with intent and purpose.

Like wise, your DNA either 1) just happened or 2) it was put there with intent and purpose.

Scientifically speaking (and despite the apparently unpleasant implication of a God or alien creator), information does not just happen.   Claiming “it just happened” is as religious as claiming “God did it.”

Explaining how it happened (without violating the above laws) – now that is science!

Conflict:

Below is a quote from the research being done at the Center for Astrophysics in a combined effort between Harvard  College Observatory and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.  Under a single director, their studies pursue those basic physical processes that determine the nature and evolution of the universe.  Here is a quote from their article, Theories for Life’s Origin.

Favored by most scientists today, the central premise of chemical evolution stipulates that life arose naturally from nonlife. In this sense, the theories of chemical evolution and spontaneous generation are similar, but the timescales differ. Chemical evolution doesn’t occur suddenly; instead, it proceeds more gradually, eventually building complex structures from simpler ones.

Evolutionist must answer the questions: How do you get from basic elements to complex chemicals?  How do you get from complex chemicals to code?  How do you get a code without designing one?  How do you get encoders and decoders without a code?

As scientist and engineers think about the rationality and truthiness of  any hypothesis, we propose and examine thought questions.  Einstein did thought questions.  Here is one for the evolutionist.  Say you are hiking in the Smokey Mountains with an abundance of iron ore and wood all around you.  How (what mechanism) does evolution use to produce a mouse trap with all of those resources laying around?

Conclusion:

So, Is Evolution a Theory?  The Theory of Evolution cannot be a valid theory because it is incompatible with many Laws of Nature.   The Theory of Evolution must be discarded.