How Did Life on Earth Start? part 2 - SC2508

SPEAKER A Welcome to Science Conversations. I'm Kaysie Vokurka. Can living cells arise by chance? Well, joining me to discuss part two of this topic is Dr. John Ashton. Thank you for joining us today. Dr. JOHN Hi Kaysaie. So we're going to be referring a little bit more to Dr. John Ashton's book Evolution Impossible. We're looking at chapter three today. So we're going to discuss a bit more about that. Now, John, scientists talk about, when they talk about life beginning, they usually are referring to what we call simple life or a single celled organism as being like the starting point of life beginning. So how simple are such life forms? SPEAKER B Yes, I think this is really one of the serious challenges to trying to explain how life can form. A lot of studies have been done on the bacteria E. Coli, which is a single cell organism. Now, it's not the simplest life form. Perhaps we can get a bit of an idea. And so back in 1996, there were two volumes, about two and a half thousand pages in content publishing the biochemistry of E. Coli. And of course one of the things is that just this cell contains about 2.4 million protein molecules made up of 4,000 different types of proteins that make up this simple organism. There's about a quarter of a million nucleic acids, molecules that make up about 660 different types of nucleic acids. SPEAKER A So that would be the DNA and. SPEAKER B They'Re composed there make up the DNA. If we look at the DNA itself, it's about 4.6 million of these bases in the DNA code. It's a pretty big code for that. SPEAKER A For a tiny organism. SPEAKER B Well, very, very simple organism. So this is one of the ones that's. But then we also have all the different types of sugar molecules, millions of those. There's millions of different types of fat molecules as well, of all different types. And then of course there's about 70% of the cell is water. But one of the features is that when these life forms, when this simple cell form, we often people talk about forming one nucleotide and one sugar molecule, one fat molecule. But what we've got to produce are millions of identical molecules of 40 or 50 different types. So you've gotta have millions of each type, 40 or 50 different types. And the same with proteins, hundreds of different types of proteins, but millions of these proteins. And then they've all gotta be put together. So the probability is not one of each coming together. We've gotta have millions of these coming together and then being assembled. So this is where you know, the probability gets, you know, becomes astounding. Now, Nicole, of course, isn't the simplest cell organism that we know. There's some that are a little bit smaller than that that have been known to survive. But it's quite interesting when we look at the probability of something like this arising. There was a paper published around about 2010, I think, or somewhere near there by Dr. Eugene Koonin. Now, he is one of the top researchers in this area of evolutionary genetics. Matter of fact, he's the distinguished investigator, Evolutionary Genomics Research Group at the National Institute of Health in the United States. And he looked at what he envisaged would be the simplest type of organism that could reproduce. And so he had just two RNAs with a total size of about 1,000 nucleotides. He had 10 primitive adapters of about 30 nucleotides each. So that was a total of about 300 nucleotides, just one RNA encoding replicas of about 500 nucleotides. And when he worked out the probability of these just forming, coming together, the probability was 1 in 10 to the power 1018. So his conclusion was that a biogenesis is absolutely impossible, unless originally there were an infinite number of universes. And in one of those universes, somehow life formed. And that happened to be our universe here on Earth. So that's what he's saying is that it's. The probability is just so huge. Right. And this is we haven't made this thing alive yet, by the way, getting their molecules. We're just getting the molecules together. Right? SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER B The probability is beyond impossible. So philosophers have looked at what is the probability of something really being impossible in our universe. In other words, the chance of a particular event happening in our universe being calculated by mathematical philosophers that work in this space. And it's 10 to the power of 150. Anything that is smaller than or a chance less than a power of 1 in 10 to the power 150. So we're looking here at a probability of 10 to the power 1,018, way above that already. Now, again, as I said, Yuji Koonin as one of the top genetic research, he has a huge genetics team, and this is the work they're working on. Now, one of the other fascinating things is when we look at this, not only do we have to form all these sugar molecules and protein molecules and fat molecules and assemble them, we have to have what we call the DNA code, the deoxyribonucleic acid code. Now, this code encodes for all the components of the cell, and so that there's sort of a blueprint code so that the cell can replicate, but the code itself needs a code reader. Because without a code reader, the code itself is useless. Like for example, if I spelled out the word for you, Z I, V I, s, many people, except people living in a particular country wouldn't be able to read that code. My best friend in primary school could tell me what that meant. So that's fish in Latvian. SPEAKER A Oh, wow. SPEAKER B So unless you have the code reader that can read that code, it's meaningless. And of course a ribosome, the structure of a ribosome, this is a particular molecular machine that is in a living cell. And the structure of that was only discovered in about 2006. And scientists that discovered it were awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2007. And it was a team of scientists unravelled the structure of this cell with over 300,000 atoms in it. So machines like this also have to form by random chance, otherwise the cell is useless. But one of the fascinating things is that the DNA code encodes to make a ribosome to read it. So the DNA code encodes the code to make a ribosome, but the code is useless unless there is already a ribosome to read the code. So here we see again, this whole mechanism is absolutely impossible. Now the other thing is too, for a lot of these reactions to occur to assemble these molecules, and there are a lot of problems in biosystems, we have to have molecules in biological systems. Some of these types of proteins and that that are formed can form in what we call either a left hand or a right hand form. And one form is usually bioactive, the other form is not bioactive or may even be detrimental or poisonous. And so again this increase, we've got to have systems where if they require a left handed molecule, it's got to be a left handed molecule, right handed molecule. So again this reduces the probability even further. So there's particular structures that have to form that way. The other thing is too that the order in which, when we're making proteins that amino acids assemble in small, certain small molecules that we call enzyme, the order of those amino acids is also a little code that makes helps other molecules become atoms either become available for a reaction or not a reaction. So that's why we call an enzyme facilitates certain reactions to occur that otherwise wouldn't. But the structure of those enzymes is very critical on the order and placement of the amino acids in that sequence. So here again just the probability of some of these enzymes arising by chance is huge. That would be required to catalyse the reactions in order to form these particular long polymer molecules. The other major problem that we have is that a lot of these series, we talk about life evolving in a little pond and this sort of thing, you not only have to form the basic simple monomer or small molecule, but you've got to assemble it into long polymers. Most of the structures in these living systems are what we call polymers. They're very long molecules, some hundreds long, where the basic structure is repeated hundreds of times. Now, this is generally achieved by what we call condensation reactions, where we actually join the bonds by removing water. Now, that reaction won't go in an aqueous solution. It goes the other way. Leuchatelier's principle tells us that a reaction to remove water will not occur in water except under very unusual, extreme situations with catalysts and so forth. And so. SPEAKER A And they believe that there was a lot of water. SPEAKER B Well, that's right. And they need water so that these molecules can move around, Right. To meet up with one another or arrive on the surface of a clay or something. Otherwise there's no way that the individual components can be mobile to meet up with one another. And the other factor is, though, that this won't occur. So these reactions won't occur in water. So this is one. The whole thing that the environment, when we need to understand we've got ultraviolet light, will break down most of these things. Water itself will break down all of these things. There's also the probability of toxic arrangements will form. So just a combination of hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen, of course, is hydrogen cyanide, very toxic to many organisms. So these sort of reactions can. And we can have the formation of toxic compounds. And also we have to have certain minerals be incorporated into these structures as well. These have to come in bioavailable forms, be made bioavailable and form their own specific structures. But even if all these things came together, the organism is not necessarily alive. SPEAKER A Yeah. So again, we're talking about how these chemicals are forming. And we're getting the right amount of them in the right configuration, in the right proportions. Like that's where we're at at the moment. And we're already running into huge problems. SPEAKER B We're already way impossible. Absolutely impossible. So absolutely impossible, from a number of reasons were absolutely impossible. Because the molecules that are required are so complex, the chances of them just forming, even if the chemistry was right, is statistically impossible. Secondly, most of the chemical reactions required won't occur in just an open environment. They'll maybe occur in very clean, protected glassware environment or inside the protection of a living cell. Most, again, the reactions often require specific catalysts or enzymes to be available to be in the right location at that particular time. We have specific confirmation of the chemistry of these molecules. They can come often. Reactions can occur in a number of places, but they have to occur in specific places in specific conformations like rather, right hand or left handed and so forth. So the constraints in forming these molecules. And secondly, we just don't have to produce one. We've got to often produce millions or in the minimum, hundreds of identical molecules so we have enough to form the structures of these cells. And the chances again of that happening all being in the same place at the right time, plus then a code forming within the cell that describes the structure of that cell that has form works. We can see it's so obvious that it is absolutely impossible. There's no naturalistic explanation for how a cell can form. No naturalistic. The evidence for a cell is supernatural and it points us to the existence of some supernatural force or creator. SPEAKER A They can put it all together. Yeah, well, absolutely profound to consider these things and we're going to talk a little bit more along these lines shortly. We're going to continue to examine the question, can living cells arise by chance? In the next programme, be sure to join us.