For the first living thing to suddenly appear on earth would have been a very dramatic development indeed. Let's say the first living cell was a bacterium. At the very least it would have to find something appropriate to feed on, and then work out how to get rid of waste matter. It would also need to discover that essential for all living things - how to reproduce itself. Whilst it didn't have to engage in the tricky business of sex it did need to discover how to split into two separate individuals, each equipped with all the essentials of life.
The bacterium cell would have contained DNA which stores information. DNA consists of at least hundreds of genes which contain long chains of things called nucleotides. Each nucleotide has three parts - a phosphate group, a sugar, and four nitrogen bases. These bases are guanine (G), cytosine (C), adenine (A), and thymine (T).
The sequence in which these bases (G, C, A, and T) are arranged constitutes the cell's genetic code.This code tells the cell how to build the amino acids which are the building blocks for the proteins that are appropriate for that cell. Proteins are, of course,very complex; and they are absolutely essential for all life.
The explanation is often given that, just as 26 letters of the alphabet can be used to form an endless series of words that we use to produce our prodigious range of ideas, so these bases can be arranged to send out huge numbers of messages to direct in the development of all aspects of the cell's life, including its reproductive activity. It was a veritable library of information.
There are other freakish things that have to happen for a living cell to emerge from mud. For example, amino acids are either right-handed or left-handed. (Don't ask!) Amino acids in living things must all be left-handed. Seeing the probability of a left-handed amino acid turning up is 0.5 and assuming there were only 100 amino acid positions to fill in the first living cell the chances of all of them being filled by left-handed amino acids is 0.5 raised to the power of 100, which means the chances of getting all of the places being filled by left-handed amino acids is about one chance in 10 to the power of 30.
Unimaginative creationists say the chance of a living cell emerging with those skills is vanishingly small; therefore it didn't happen. Even many atheists agree that the chances are very slim. That's why they want to shift the problem of origins to outer space, and claim that life forms landed here via a meteorite or something similar. Creationist Christians likewise shift the problem to outer space and claim that God did it all.
Arguably the claims of evolutionists break down at the very first hurdle - the first cell. Thus if we can plausibly invoke God to organize the first jump to life then there is every reason to believe that He would have had a significant role in the later developments of living things as well. Many of them were quite freakish too.
What scientists need to do, and what they are certainly desperately trying to do, is to create a living creature themselves. If it happened originally by accident it can't be all that complicated, can it? But even if humans did create some simple life form it wouldn't persuade me that original life was an accident. Humans can create mouth organs, golf balls, bicycles and computers; but I don't expect ever to see some version of a mouth organ, a golf ball, or a miniature computer (that was clearly not man-made) emerging from dirt.
Oh, you say, there is no way for inorganic products to breed. Therefore a very primitive version of a mouth organ, for example, couldn't produce variations that would lead to more effective mouth organs through survival of the fittest. I agree. Nor was there any chance of chemicals producing the first living cell through variations and the survival of the fittest. Chemicals don't breed either.
I'm sure magicians could make it appear that they have turned mud into microbes, but I'm not a magician. And, alas, I won't be turning real mud into real microbes - unless a very freakish accident happens.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/8743634
No comments:
Post a Comment