Cell Repair Requirement Demolishes Origin-of-Life Speculation

A biology professor who came out of a Darwinian communist country explodes origin-of-life speculation with real world facts about genetic repair mechanisms.

The Latest OOL Folly

Scientific materialists are prone to wild speculation as they concoct implausible scenarios for the origin of life. Why? Because they allow no competition from non-Darwinists. If you are not a scientific materialist, or if you subscribe to theories of causation beyond the Stuff Happens Law of sheer dumb luck, you are out of luck, as far as getting your ideas published in the science journals. For this reason, the secular media get away with loony ideas such as the following:

Meteorites may have brought building blocks of life to Earth (McMaster University Daily News). This hypothesis of special delivery of “building blocks of life” by meteorites into pools of sterile water that underwent wetting-and-drying cycles was published in PNAS., where they invent the acronym WLP to stand for Darwin’s “warm little ponds”. Words cannot describe how foolish this hypothesis is for those who know the facts of molecular biology, but readers are coaxed to get all excited by the media’s enthusiasm:

Life on Earth began somewhere between 3.7 and 4.5 billion years ago, after meteorites splashed down and leached essential elements into warm little ponds, say scientists at McMaster University and the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

Their calculations suggest that wet and dry cycles bonded basic molecular building blocks in the ponds’ nutrient-rich broth into self-replicating RNA molecules that constituted the first genetic code for life on the planet….

“No one’s actually run the calculation before,” says Pearce. “This is a pretty big beginning. It’s pretty exciting.”

Life on Earth May Have Started with a Cosmic Splash (Space.com). “A new study bolsters the theory that the chemical origins of life on Earth were midwifed by meteorites that delivered essential building blocks from space.” Actual human midwives came a few billion years later, according to the Darwin cult.

Evidence suggests life on Earth started after meteorites splashed into warm little ponds (Astrobiology Magazine). “Though the “warm little ponds” concept has been around since Darwin, the researchers have now proven its plausibility through numerous evidence-based calculations.” See Illustra’s Origin clips for a more realistic view about ‘plausibility’.

Their scenario relies on the myth of progress. Researchers assume that building blocks somehow ‘want’ to build themselves up into living entities, starting with a simple RNA molecule that can replicate itself. Replicators in the ‘RNA World’ may be crude at first, but in Darwin Fantasyland, they will  ‘want’ to get better over time. Natural selection is Tinker Bell’s magic wand for ratcheting up the success rate. What they fail to remember is that (1) Known RNA replicators are best at cutting themselves up, not getting more complex (and no, they don’t ‘want’ to get better at it – they want to fall apart), and (2) Without accurate replication from the beginning, ‘error catastrophe’ sets in, destroying any gains. Here is a dose of realism to shame these imagineers back to the real world.

A Quick Answer

The anonymous biology professor that we quoted in our September 20 article had this to say about real-world biology:

Now, as far as the wonder of biochemistry, I wonder if I may be just briefly permitted to add to your wonderful description of the beginning. And that is that every cell in our body, every single day of our life, sustains more than 20,000 lesions to the DNA. So the question is not just, “How did life originate?” but “How is life even possible?”. And these 20,000 lesions, by the way, are merely from endogenous causes. It’s like working in the kitchen: you get a little wet, you’re a little burnt, a little cut, this, that, and the other. If you work in the garage, same thing: you always have to have a box of bandages somewhere nearby handy, for a very simple reason, because you expect it, you are going to sustain some injury.

Similarly, on a molecular level, every cell sustains 20,000 lesions every single day of our lives, to its DNA. So the question is, “How is it possible for life to even be maintained?” And that necessitates a fully-developed repair machinery that is already in place when you begin with life in order to maintain the integrity of the DNA. When that repair mechanism fails for whatever reason—and it is a very elaborate one (some records say that the most modest bacterium has more than 200 repair mechanisms in play at all times)—are we getting the sense of the complexity of this? So it’s not sufficient to get just a ‘replicator’. You have to have the repair shop for it. And then you have to have all the repair tools, and the repairmen, in order to maintain this thing from falling apart. And people who for whatever reason have lost some of these repair mechanisms, they display many of the repair disorders that result from that.

Jonathan Wells was present when the professor made these comments. He added,

One thing I would add as a molecular biologist/embryologist is that even if you have all this stuff you’re talking about (and you need it to survive), there’s more on top of that. For example, when the DNA is transcribed into RNA, the RNA, or the protein from it, has to go to a certain place in the cell to do its job. That spatial information is not in the DNA. So there are whole other levels of codes. There’s the bioelectric code; there’s the membrane code; the sugar code—all in addition to the DNA. So life is really wondrous.

So unless materialists invent the repair kit alongside the replicator, the replicator falls apart within the first few iterations. Hear the professor’s comments on ID the Future, 9/18/17.

And that’s just the beginning of woes for the secularist. Follow our “Origin of Life” category for mountains of evidence we have shared for 16 years now that destroys any unguided scenario for the origin of life, including the ‘RNA World’ joke.

For more problems with Darwinian theory, read this book.

We need to get angry at these charlatans and their enablers in the media. How much longer can we endure their shenanigans? Remember, too, that the entire Darwinian edifice (the House of Cards), with all its amoral, wicked baggage rests on this foundation of sand. Stop letting them get away with it!