It is impossible to let atoms randomly smashing into each other and pop into a life form, even if we have four brilliant years for the smashing. Can we conclude that life form did not start from random physical processes? Obviously, evolutionists do not agree.
Do evolutionists claim that they know how the first life form started? I believe a humble evolutionist would tell you – not really. What do they say about the first life form?
A search on the internet would probably lead you to a description of a classic biological experiment done in 1993. The experiment started with trillions of different RNA molecules consisting of approximately 300 nucleotides, arranged in random sequence. Buried in these huge amounts of RNA molecules were a few catalytic molecules called ribozymes that catalyze a ligation reaction, so that one strand of RNA is linked to a second strand. These ribozymes were made to flush around the trillions of random RNA molecules. The end result was that specific groups of RNA molecules characterized with specific lengths were formed out of the initial totally random mixture of molecules.
What is the conclusion? Genetic information can appear in random mixtures of polymers! It only needs a population that contains large numbers of polymeric molecules with variable monomer sequences, and a way to select and amplify a specific property.
Friends, I apology for all the technical terms above. I hope it gives you a sense of the experiment. Many people claim that it “proves” that genetic information can really come from random physical processes.
Do I agree that the experiment shows genetic information can be generated from random processes? I definitely don’t, as you expected.
Who set up the right environment for the “experiment” to start with? It needs a huge amount of RNA molecules. These are not random particles, but specific molecules that we called RNA. To create one of these RNA molecules from random smashing of particles (we also need the right kinds of particles!) is already a miracle. We need trilliants of these miracles to start the experiment. It also needs the ribozymes to catalyze the reaction. Who created these ribozymes? But these are not the major issues. I think the difficult part is the “information” part.
Going back to the experiment. What is the “genetic information” that the experiment created? The ligation reaction happened, and the all-different RNA molecules now turn into different groups characterized by different lengths or different structure of nucleotides. So what? The newly formed “information” is random information. Did the different information of the RNA groups combine to form any kind of useful hints for the RNA molecules to survive better? Recall that the information encoded in our DNA can fill 1000 books, and each word in each of the 1000 books are not just a bunch of random characters.
I think the information created in the experiment is comparable with the information carried by an English letter. The letter “A” is different from the letter “B”. Each letter carries some information. Remember the example of “typing Shakespeare’s play by monkey’s random strokes on typewriter”? I think the classic experiment mentioned above tells us that evolutionists found a way for the monkey to type a meaningful letter. However, it is clear that evolutionary biology still has a very long way to go to explain how the letters can combine to become a meaningful paragraph, not to mention a thousand books.
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