The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [125]
SCENARIO #3: CHEMICAL AFFINITIES AND SELF-ORDERING
Meyer pointed out that by the early 1970s, most origin-of-life scientists had become disenchanted with the options of random chance and natural selection. As a result, some explored a third possibility: various self-organizational theories for the origin of information-bearing macromolecules.
For example, scientists theorized that chemical attractions may have caused DNA’s four-letter alphabet to self-assemble or that the natural affinities between amino acids prompted them to link together by themselves to create protein. When I broached these possibilities, Meyer’s response was to bring up a name I had already encountered during my investigation.
“One of the first advocates of this approach was Dean Kenyon, who coauthored the textbook Biochemical Predestination,” Meyer said. “The title tells it all. The idea was that the development of life was inevitable because the amino acids in proteins and the bases, or letters, in the DNA alphabet had self-ordering capacities that accounted for the origin of the information in these molecules.”
I already knew that Kenyon had repudiated the conclusions of his own book, declaring that “we have not the slightest chance of a chemical evolutionary origin for even the simplest of cells” and that intelligent design “made a great deal of sense, as it very closely matched the multiple discoveries in molecular biology.” 24 Still, I wanted to consider the evidence for myself.
“How did this chemical attraction supposedly work?” I asked.
“We’ll use proteins as an example,” he said. “Remember, proteins are composed of a long line of amino acids. The hope was that there would be some forces of attraction between the amino acids that would cause them to line up the way they do and then fold so that the protein can perform the functions that keep a cell alive.”
I interrupted. “You have to admit that there are examples in nature where chemical attractions do result in a kind of self-ordering.”
“That’s right,” Meyer said. “Salt crystals are a good illustration. Chemical forces of attraction cause sodium ions, Na+, to bond with chloride ions, Cl–, in order to form highly ordered patterns within a crystal of salt. You get a nice sequence of Na and Cl repeating over and over again. So, yes, there are lots of cases in chemistry where bonding affinities of different elements will explain the origin of their molecular structure. Kenyon and others hoped this would be the case for proteins and DNA.”
“What turned out to be the problem?” I asked.
“As scientists did experiments, they found that amino acids didn’t demonstrate these bonding affinities,” Meyer replied.
“None at all?”
“There were some very, very slight affinities, but they don’t correlate to any of the known patterns of sequencing that we find in functional proteins. Obviously, that’s a major problem—but there was an even bigger theoretical difficulty. Information theorist Hubert Yockey and chemist Michael Polanyi raised a deeper issue: ‘What would happen if we could explain the sequencing in DNA and proteins as a result of self-organization properties? Wouldn’t we end up with something like a crystal of salt, where there’s merely a repetitive sequence?’ ” 25
When I asked Meyer to elaborate, he said: “Consider the genetic information in DNA, which is spelled out by the chemical letters A, C, G, and T. Imagine every time you had an A, it would automatically attract a G. You’d just have a repetitive sequence: A-G-A-G-A-G-A-G. Would that give you a gene that could produce a protein? Absolutely not. Self-organization wouldn’t yield a genetic message, only a repetitive mantra.
“To convey information, you need irregularity in sequencing. Open any book; you won’t see the word ‘the’ repeating over and over and over. Instead, you have an irregular sequencing of letters. They convey information because they