The 4th step on the stairway to life poses another insurmountable hurdle for the evolutionist (see artwork, right). DNA and proteins form the cell’s basic building blocks, but to call them mere blocks is an insult. They’re more like machine-fabricated trains. Just as railroad cars must be specially built and linked to provide a delivery service (see photos, below), so must nucleotides and amino acids come together in one specific way (called the “canonical form”) to create viable DNA and proteins.
Textbook pictures of DNA’s double-helix or protein’s noodle-like twisted amino acids can lead one to assume that’s the only shape their chemical components (called monomers) will form. Oh no! There are hundreds of different configurations, if left to themselves. Life’s building blocks, like trains, require a consistent shape in pre-defined linkage to work. It's been shown this does not happen by chance.
In early ‘90’s, some biologists tried to chemically link monomers (here, DNA parts called nucleotides) in a lab. Of course, they cheated by assuming the first three steps to life already occurred: they used all the right parts: homochiral “left-handed” parts, no destructive solvents like water, in just the right concentration, with the correct pH and at the right temperature. Even with this unnatural head start, they only joined 11 monomers but one third bonded incorrectly. More recently, scientists added a certain type of clay to chain 50 monomers, but now 45% were wrong – and the clay distorts the DNA code. In fact, the more they linked, the more likely they were to fail. Sometimes the ends of long chains connected to form a loop, but that doesn’t work in any living creature.
Bear in mind, even one failed link is like one derailed train car: you get a train wreck, fatal to life (see photo, right). Even the simplest bacterial genome requires 500,000 nucleotide cars in its DNA train. It seems evolutionists can’t get past their own scientific results: as a rule, organic systems, given energy and left to themselves, devolve into a useless tar-like mixture. They call this rule the “asphalt paradox”.
Sadly, it doesn’t end there. Precise linkage of amino acids into proteins must occur both accurately and quickly. The best labs today synthesize 100 amino acids into small proteins in one day – and most of the bonds are wrong. Even this requires a team of scientists hovering over the petri dish. By comparison, simple E. coli synthesizes 1,200 amino acids into proteins in one minute with exceptional accuracy.
Thus, cells require pre-existing sophisticated molecular machines (e.g., enzymes, ribosomes) to ensure 100% correct chemical bonds. No natural process yields homo-linkage of monomers into the canonical form. To me, only the person of the Lord Jesus Christ is upholding all things by the Word of His power. All other options are way off track.
Source: Dr. Change Laura Tan and Rob Stadler, The Stairway To Life: An Origin-of-Life Reality Check, Evorevo Books, 2020, chapter 10.
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