Monthly Archives: July 2014

Information Revisited – New Proteins

Science, , , ,

Last week I explained why random events cannot create meaningful information. This week let’s see how recent laboratory results confirm that, by looking at the creation of new proteins.

Proteins are biological machine parts. They are manufactured using the code in DNA by snapping together the specified sequence of amino acids. All life uses the same 20 amino acids, and they are snapped together, like plastic building blocks, and folded into a functional protein, a working biological machine part. Functional proteins are rare, in exactly the same way that a random collection of letters is rarely going to form a coherent paragraph.One very recent estimate is that human beings have about 19,000 functional proteins.

In 2009 researchers at the University of Oregon found that Darwinian, chance-based evolution doesn’t work in reverse – that is, once you have a new protein, there is essentially zero chance that natural processes will somehow be able to recreate the original protein. In June 2014, in an article published in prestigious Nature magazine, they found tremendous problems with forward evolution. They found that to get from one protein to another you had to assume a fantastically unlikely exact sequence of intermediate steps.

In other words, they disproved Darwinian evolution –it all happened solely by chance and natural selection. They verified in the lab that natural processes alone cannot create information. Of course, they don’t admit it. Just like most scientists worldwide seek to ignore the ENCODE results of 2012, that substantially all of our human DNA serves a function, and that we have multiple levels of information in our DNA coding.

So where does information come from? Where did the DNA coding come from to build the thousands of functional proteins in our bodies?

“If you start with a protein that has a particular function, to some extent you can generally change some of the amino acids in its sequence, and the protein will still perform that same function. But you can’t rationally expect to “accidentally” mutate from one functional protein to another amino acid sequence with a new function. The odds of that are one in 1063 for 92 amino acid sequences and one in 1077 for 150 amino acid sequences, and far worse for longer amino acid sequences.” Counting To God, p. 158.

Thanks for reading.

Information – Monkeys or God?

Science

Where does information come from? Did you ever hear of that blind monkey typing? Some argue that, if the monkey types long enough, you will get anything you are looking for.

But simple math shows the monkey cannot generate meaningful information within the “probabilistic resources” of the universe. Take any stream of words/letters more than one hundred letters long. If every particle (proton, neutron, electron) in the universe was a monkey, each typing at random as fast as theoretically possible (enough books to fill a ball 200 million miles in diameter every second!), for the entire 14 billion years of the universe, you still have essentially zero chance that your particular arrangement of words/letters appears ANYWHERE in all those books!

Now combine that with the recent stunning accepted scientific fact that every species has large amounts of new information. This information is in the form of unique DNA coding (genes) containing the instructions to build the machine parts (proteins) that make that organism unique, like preventing freezing in polar cod or toxins for jellyfish. The leaf cutter ant has over 9,000 unique genes, and each is like a paragraph of information.

Where did all this information come from? Darwinian theories based solely on accidental mutations and natural selection don’t work. The monkey couldn’t have typed it by accident. Information is scientific evidence of the existence of God.

Thanks for reading.