The Origin of Us

Where did we come from? It is not a question we think about during the course of our days which are filled with more practical matters. Given that is the question even important at all? I get to that question is a later blog. For now I want to explore the science of origins - the origin of life itself. In the 19th century, it was assumed that creating life would be rather easy. The intricacies of cell biology were unknown. Biologists tends to see the cell (in Haekel’s words) as a “homogeneous globule of protoplasm”. The thought in those days was that all the was necessary was to mix some basics ingredients into a “soup” add time and life emerges. It was only in the 1930s that scientist began to see the the cell was quite complex. Scientists repeatedly underestimated the cells complexity. It was only in the 1950s that the true complexity of the cell was starting to revealed as the structure of DNA was beginning to be understood. What we now know today is the enormous amount of information which is encoded in DNA. Not just biology but information theory must be studied. The cell has information but it is specified information, that is, it specifies functionality. It is not just random information but highly specific information. Therefore any origin of life theory must explain how the “software” programming” of the cell came to be. We now know that this type of specified complexity is beyond the reach of chance (refer to Scientific American, “The Constraints of Chance”, Jan 1996). Even a short 100 amino acid chain has a random probability of form which a chance of 1 in 1060 which is vanishingly small as there are only 1065 atoms in the universe. Other speculative theories have arisen that deal with self-organizational scenarios but all have come up short in explain how the information in even the simplest cell could arise. There is no naturalistic explanation at the current time. The only theory which has any credibility as this time is the argument from intelligent design. This is not an argument from ignorance but rather an argument from the evidence. This background information and the case of the intelligent design inference is now well documented. For those who want a detailed, long but readable article on these matters, refer to Dr. S.C Meyers article “DNA and the Origin of Life: Information, Specification and Explanation".