Early Life...

It's been awhile since I've posted to the M.E.L. blog. Mostly, I've been blogging on the Sacred Cow Wursthaus, and anyone interested in more of what I have to say should go there. I've even taken to re-posting some of my info from this blog over to the other one. Still, as someone who is back in college studying biology, I occasionally come across good material which completely blasts creationist nonsense. And I came across some last semester. Here's what I've learned.

It's been claimed by some creationists, particularly the "intelligent design" variety, that early life couldn't have formed because of a tautological impossibility regarding biochemistry. Protein needs DNA to form, while DNA needs protein to form. Since one needs the other, its irreduceably comples. Some intelligent agent agent had to have gotten the process started.

Here's why that's false: First, protein doesn't need DNA to form. Specified protein chains do require DNA, but proteins, consisting of chains of amino acids, do form spontaneously, usually in only a few linkages. But complex protein chains can also come about by high-velocity impacts. Take a bunch of primordial soup laced with amino acids, place it inside a cylinder, and smash the contents sharply with a piston, and you can get complex amino acid chains. This is significant because the early Earth was constantly bombarded with comets and asteroids!

But there's more. It has been observed for quite some time that RNA can form spontaneously, and so many scientists are working to discover just how an RNA world could evolve into a DNA world. We might not have the answer yet, but we do know one thing: RNA folds up upon itself just like protein does!

Here's how protein works: It's like beads on a chain. Some beads attract, others repel. This makes the beads fold up in certain ways to make little micro-machines, which move one way and then another in response to ATP getting converted to ADP. This machinery pretty much runs all life on the chemical level. But if you have no protein beads, you have no machine, right?

Wrong! RNA is comprised of bead-like components. Smaller, and flimsier, but RNA does fold up. This means that RNA can make all the components needed to produce protein. In fact, RNA is still the primary means of making protein from DNA, using t-RNA and ribosomes!

So, relax, creationists. You don't have a case on this one.

Eric