The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [124]
The backside of that same mountain, however, has a gradual slope that makes for much easier climbing. This represents the Darwinian idea that nature provides small chance variations and then natural selection chooses the ones that are most advantageous. Over long periods of time, little changes accumulate into major differences. So while the mountain looks impossible to climb from the cliff side, it’s quite easy to scale via the smaller Darwinian steps of natural selection on the backside. 17
In light of that insight, I asked Meyer: “Can natural selection explain how evolution managed to scale the mountain of building the first living cell?”
“Whether natural selection really works at the level of biological evolution is open to debate, but it most certainly does not work at the level of chemical evolution, which tries to explain the origin of the first life from simpler chemicals,” Meyer replied. “As Theodosius Dobzhansky said, ‘Prebiological natural selection is a contradiction in terms.’ ” 18
“How so?” I asked.
“Darwinists admit that natural selection requires a self-replicating organism to work,” he explained. “Organisms reproduce, their offspring have variations, the ones that are better adapted to their environment survive better, and so those adaptations are preserved and passed on to the next generation.
“However, to have reproduction, there has to be cell division. And that presupposes the existence of information-rich DNA and proteins. But that’s the problem—those are the very things they’re trying to explain!
“In other words, you’ve got to have a self-replicating organism for Darwinian evolution to take place, but you can’t have a self-replicating organism until you have the information necessary in DNA, which is what you’re trying to explain in the first place. It’s like the guy who falls into a deep hole and realizes he needs a ladder to get out. So climbs out, goes home, gets a ladder, jumps back into the hole, and climbs out. It begs the question.”
I raised another possibility. “Maybe replication first began in a much simpler way and then natural selection was able to take over,” I said. “For example, some small viruses use RNA as their genetic material. RNA molecules are simpler than DNA, and they can also store information and even replicate. What about the so-called ‘RNA first hypothesis’ that says reproductive life originated in a realm that’s much less complex than DNA?”
“There’s a mountain of problems with that,” he said. “Just to cite a couple of them, the RNA molecule would need information to function, just as DNA would, and so we’re right back to the same problem of where the information came from. Also, for a single strand of RNA to replicate, there must be an identical RNA molecule close by. To have a reasonable chance of having two identical RNA molecules of the right length would require a library of ten billion billion billion billion billion billion RNA molecules—and that effectively rules out any chance origin of a primitive replicating system.” 19
Although popular for a while, the RNA theory has generated its share of skeptics. Evolutionist Robert Shapiro, a chemistry professor at New York University, said the idea at this point “must be considered either a speculation or a matter of faith.” 20 Origin-of-life researcher Graham Cairns-Smith said the “many interesting and detailed experiments in this area” have only served to show that the theory is “highly implausible.” 21 As Jonathan Wells noted in my earlier interview with him, biochemist Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Center was even more blunt: “You have to build straw man upon straw man to get to the point where RNA is a viable first biomolecule.” 22
Jay Roth, former professor of cell and molecular biology at the University of Connecticut and an expert in nucleic acids, said whether the original template for the first living system was RNA or DNA, the same problem exists. “Even reduced to the barest essentials,