Life: a product of chance or design?

In a previous post, we discussed how information stored in DNA represents the highest level of information. We concluded that the best hypothesis for the origin of this information is an intelligent agent. In this post, I will give some useful examples of why at the core of all living organisms there are clear signs of intelligence design.  

All living systems are formed of building blocks called proteins. These are manufactured by ribosomes, which are also formed of proteins. This constitutes one of the many chicken-and-egg problems of the origin of life. In any case, these proteins are long chains of amino acids. The information in DNA “tells” the proteins in the cell how to fold, like an instruction manual, forming specific 3D shapes. It is precisely this shape that gives proteins their function. Think about it like a key, it has to have a specific shape that matches the lock to open the door. However, for proteins, it is a bit more complicated than that. The specific sequence of amino acids in the chains is what determines their final shape, and this sequence has to be just so for the protein to be functional (to have the right shape).

We know that there are 20 different amino acids. Being conservative, let's take a 150 amino acid-long protein as our example. Considering the amount of possible 3D shapes this protein can have over the number of functional shapes, it has been shown that the probability of producing even a single functional protein of modest length (150 amino acids in the right position) by chance alone in a prebiotic environment stands at no better than a “vanishingly small” 1 chance in 10^164 (see signature in the cell book). This is an incredibly small number and what mathematicians have identified as the combinatorial problem of the origin of life.

In short, it is extremely implausible that even a single protein would have arisen by chance, even taking the entire universe over its 13.8 billion-year history into account. And keep in mind that a living cell is made of not one but many hundreds of these specialized proteins. 

Because of this, many serious origin-of-life researchers now consider chance as an inadequate explanation for the origin of biological information. These highly improbable events simply do not occur naturally, but are the result of guided and purposeful processes.

To see more clearly why, consider the following: you are walking on the beach one morning, and see the word “love” written on the sand. Without even thinking about it, you immediately deduce someone wrote that. Why? Why does it not even come to your mind the possibility of this word being the result of a natural process? Why don't you ever consider that, given the right conditions of wind, air pressure, tides, etc., a stick in water, given enough time, can move through the tides in such a way that it can "write" those letters in the sand? Because the exact arrangements of these 4 characters are not random (although highly improbable) but match an independent pattern, the English word "love". This is a clear sign of design (see the design inference book). 

Similarly, DNA is made up of four unit characters, called nucleotides, namely adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine, arranged in a sequence with a certain order, just like letters in the English language. It has been shown that it contains an incredible amount of information. But, how do we know the information in DNA is of the highest level? Because small changes in the sequence have dramatic changes in the meaning of the final message. Let’s take a random sentence of letters, for example, representing the lowest level of information (statistical level):

Anad!GrLae’ts,etp

If we change a character of that sequence, let’s say, the comma, the meaning of the sequence does not change because it does not convey any meaningful message anyway, it is the lowest level of information. In contrast, let’s take those same characters arranged in a coherent sentence conveying the highest level of information (that which requires action with a purpose in mind), for instance:

Let’s eat, Grandpa! 

Now, let's take the comma out of this sentence:

Let’s eat Grandpa!

Clearly, the meaning changes considerably. The kind request to eat together with Grandpa takes a dark turn to cannibalism. This is a fundamental characteristic of information of the highest level.

That’s precisely the type of information in DNA. The generic code inside our cells sets the structure of how each of us looks (among many other things). If we make one small change in the nucleotide sequence of our genome, that will also change significantly how we look. It will change fundamentally who we are, and this is hard to explain through naturalistic processes alone. 

If we instinctively deduce that a simple, short word like “love” written in the sand comes from a mind, shouldn’t we infer even more strongly that the language-like information we see in DNA, which would be equivalent to finding an unimaginable number of detailed instruction manuals in the sand, also comes from an intelligent mind?

As Geophysics and philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer puts it:

“There isn’t a single example anywhere in the history of the universe in which information came from anything other than an intelligence source”. 

Post based on Stephen C. Meyer's Signature in the cell book, and William A. Dembski & Winston Ewert's The design inference book, see resources

Image credit: https://www.theweek.in/news/sci-tech/2020/01/18/How-key-molecule-for-life-origin-reached-Earth-decoded.html