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11-27-09, 10:46 AM
We know that there are right-handed and left-handed gloves. This is also true of amino acid molecules. Of some 100 known amino acids, only 20 are used in proteins, and all are left-handed ones. When scientists make amino acids in laboratories, in imitation of what they feel possibly occurred in a prebiotic soup, they find an equal number of right-handed and left-handed molecules. “This kind of 50-50 distribution,” reports The New York Times, is “not characteristic of life, which depends on left-handed amino acids alone.” Why living organisms are made up of only left-handed amino acids is “a great mystery.” Even amino acids found in meteorites “showed excesses of left-handed forms.”
Dr. Jeffrey L. Bada, professor of Marine Chemistry and who studies problems involving the origin of life, said that “some influence outside the earth might have played some role in determining the handedness of biological amino acids.”
British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) spent decades studying the universe and life in it, even espousing that life on earth arrived from outer space. Lecturing at the California Institute of Technology, he discussed the order of amino acids in proteins.
“The big problem in biology,” Hoyle said in 1981, “isn’t so much the rather crude fact that a protein consists of a chain of amino acids linked together in a certain way, but that the explicit ordering of the amino acids endows the chain with remarkable properties . . . If amino acids were linked at random, there would be a vast number of arrangements that would be useless in serving the purposes of a living cell. When you consider that a typical enzyme has a chain of perhaps 200 links and that there are 20 possibilities for each link, it’s easy to see that the number of useless arrangements is enormous, more than the number of atoms in all the galaxies visible in the largest telescopes. This is for one enzyme, and there are upwards of 2000 of them, mainly serving very different purposes. So how did the situation get to where we find it to be?”
Hoyle added: “Rather than accept the fantastically small probability of life having arisen through the blind forces of nature, it seemed better to suppose that the origin of life was a deliberate intellectual act.”
Professor Michael J. Behe, who serves as professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, stated: “To a person who does not feel obliged to restrict his search to unintelligent causes, the straightforward conclusion is that many biochemical systems were designed. They were designed not by the laws of nature, not by chance and necessity; rather, they were planned. . . . Life on earth at its most fundamental level, in its most critical components, is the product of intelligent activity.”
Proteins are the most abundant macromolecules found in cells. It has been estimated that they account for more than half the dry weight of most organisms! Proteins are made up of smaller building blocks called amino acids. Proteins have many functions. For example, there is hemoglobin, a protein found in red blood cells, which transports oxygen throughout your body. Then there are antibodies, which help your body to ward off disease. Other proteins, such as insulin, help you to metabolize foods as well as regulate various cellular functions. In all, there may be thousands of different kinds of proteins in your body. There may be hundreds within just a single cell !
Each protein carries out a specific function that is determined by its DNA gene. But how is the genetic information in a DNA gene decoded so that a particular protein is made? The genetic information stored in the DNA must first be transferred from the nucleus of the cell into the cytoplasm, where the ribosomes, or protein-producing factories, are located. This transfer is accomplished by means of an intermediary called ribonucleic acid (RNA). The ribosomes in the cytoplasm “read” the RNA instructions and assemble the proper sequence of amino acids to form a particular protein. Thus, there exists an interdependent relationship between DNA, RNA, and the formation of proteins.
Michael Behe, in an interview with Awake ! magazine, said: "The conclusion of design is not due to ignorance. It’s not due to what we don’t know; it’s due to what we do know. When Darwin published his book The Origin of Species 150 years ago, life seemed simple. Scientists thought that the cell was so simple that it might just spontaneously bubble up from sea mud. But since then, science has discovered that cells are enormously complex, much more complex than the machinery of our 21st-century world. That functional complexity bespeaks purposeful design."
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