Category: Proteins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtB-278kWlQ In 1966, there was a conference held at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia and this problem was first explicitly formulated. There was an MIT scientist, a professor of engineering, Murray Eden, a computer engineer who raised the problem this way. He said that, "No currently existing formal language can tolerate random changes in the symbol sequences which express its sentences. Meaning is almost invariably destroyed." Now this conference followed a picnic in 1965 on the lawn of a famous MIT physicist named Victor Weisskopf. And at the picnic an argument broke out between the physicists, the engineers, the computer scientists, and the mathematicians on one side and the biologists on the other. The biologists have been chatting up all the exciting things that had been going on in their…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Anf8qJ4qOU I'd like to illustrate the problem this way. It's called the problem of combinatorials. If you've got four dials and ten digits on each, you get ten thousand possibilities, only one combination. If you're a thief out there trying to crack this lock maybe, is it more likely that you'll crack the lock by chance or fail?  It's a trick question. What else do you have to know? You have to know how much time, how many opportunities. If you have enough opportunities to do 5001 possible combinations, it becomes more likely that you'll succeed than fail, in which case the chance hypothesis becomes more likely to be true than false. But what if the thief encounters a lock with 10 dials and 10 digits on each. This lock…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_KEVaCyaA When applied to the origin of life and the random formation of large biomolecules, probability theory clarifies the limitations of chance as a creative agent on the primordial earth. For example, what are the odds a single protein could form exclusively through the blind interactions of chemistry? Our target is one smaller-than-average molecule made from a hundred and fifty amino acids, each aligned to ensure a folded chain. Researchers have calculated that on the ancient earth, the probability of success was one chance in 10164, that's one correctly sequenced protein chain for every 100 million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion failed attempts. Despite these enormous odds some theorists argue that given enough time, anything is possible. Let's test the validity of…

https://youtu.be/gbXjqGwnT58 The amino acids are the building blocks of the proteins right? At each one of these sites, how many possible amino acids could be part of a growing protein? Do you know this from the biology that there are 20 possible protein-forming amino acids. So you've got a one in 20 chance at each site. To get two sites, how many possible combinations do you have? 20 x 20 = 400. If then you go to three sites, how many possible combinations? 20 x 20 x 20 = 8000. Now 8000 x 20 = 160,000 and we're only to four. So there's a vast number of possibilities. You've got a one in twenty times one in twenty times one in twenty times one in twenty, going out however many…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ7wN-fyZRs Some scientists claim that life might have started spontaneously from the interaction of various atoms to form the first amino acid. They claimed that somehow accidentally the odd created a super atoms, what they referred to as the primordial soup, sent some spikes and heat, and miraculously formed the fast amino acid, which then eventually bonded accidentally to form the first protein and then the proteins somehow interacted accidentally through a number of inconceivable spontaneous reactions to form the first primordial cell. One of the greatest limitations to the authenticity of these scientific explanations on the origin of life is that they can never clearly explain how amino acids were formed in nature, when in fact even in a controlled environment, it is already impossible to create and maintain…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2DvOoPZqMg When we look at something like this, we realize that someone had to know how to arrange the amino acids in order to get this to work. We attribute it naturally to genius, somebody knows how to do this. I don't know how to do this. In fact after decades and decades of very smart scientists studying all kinds of proteins, we still cannot author amino acid sequences that fold into functional proteins. We still don't know how to solve this problem - it's called the protein-folding problem, it remains unsolved. Somebody brilliant knows how to do this. When we look at things like this, we naturally intuit that genius is behind this. Anyone who wants to claim otherwise is claiming that accidental causes just happen to do the…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJy2oRxPrlg My colleagues and I worked on this problem of getting a new function for an existing protein fold, A to B transitions is what we call them. You have the same overall folded structure that can do both function A and B, but you need to do some modification to get it to go from A to B. Can evolution do it? When we went to the lab, we found that for the particular one that we examined, you can't get from A to B by any evolutionarily plausible means. When we published that and described that in technical papers, the critique has been “In the history of life, that particular A that you studied never did evolve to B, so you're studying a change that never actually happened…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZiLsXO-dYo I had in earlier work looked at the question of how hard it would be for evolution to stumble on a completely radically new protein, that’s protein that has a new structure.  Because the answer that I got in our work was that it would be extremely hard for evolution to do that, we wanted it to back up two steps and ask about a much simpler problem. Consider an organism that has a bunch of proteins that work and they do their particular functions, how hard would it be for evolution to craft a new function on an existing structure. To produce a slight modification of an existing protein that does a different job, does a different task in itself. When we looked at this smaller question, both…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezvGnLfovF4 Strobel’s search began with an examination of evidence that challenged materialistic theories of life's origin. He discovered that this negative evidence contradicted the textbook explanations that had once convinced him the blind forces of evolution could account for the creation and diversity of life on earth.  A good example of negative evidence is the 1953 origin of life experiment by Stanley Miller, the one that helped lead me into atheism in the first place. As biologist Jonathan Wells explained to me, Miller's experiment has now been thoroughly discredited. Stanley Miller put together a glass apparatus and in that apparatus he put a mixture of gases that people at the time thought reflected the atmosphere of the early Earth. Those gases were methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor. But then,…

The famed British astronomer and avowed atheist Fred Hoyle calculated that the chance of obtaining all the enzymes required for life at random is outrageously small, comparing it to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein. Evolutionist wants you to think that it's possible. Could there be a better answer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-0AksTzfx0