4fiii) � Molecular Machines � Evidence of Intelligent Design

When you look at the incredible diversity and complexity of life around us you must ask, �was it all brought into existence by chance and undirected natural forces, or is there something else going on?� Is there a plan, a design due to an intelligent cause?� This is the fundamental question.

Biochemist, Michael Behe questioned how natural processes could have assembled the intricate structures found within living cells.� Dean Kenyon, an evolutionary biologist, once thought that chemistry alone could account for the origin of life on Earth.

Natural Selection was offered by Charles Darwin as a plausible naturalistic mechanism (process) that could produce biological change over long periods of time.� Physical variations that proved to be advantageous to survival would be passed on to succeeding generations.� Over time, fundamentally different organisms would arise, according to this natural mechanism, without any form of intelligent guidance.� It is true that Horizontal evolution is a fact.� Darwin felt that he had a justifiable mechanism for explaining the appearance of complex life forms indicating design, without the need for an intelligent designer.� Natural Selection became a designer substitute.� Yet despite its wide acceptance it is now be seriously challenged in the area of biological explanation.� It is good at explaining the small changes between existing life forms, but not the very complexity of life itself.� It can explain the difference in Finch beaks, but not the origin of the Finch itself.� It is a process that Darwin himself admitted must advance in small and slow, sure steps, not in great leaps.� We need to understand where Natural Selection works and where it doesn�t.� The more we learn about the complexity of Life, the more problems we have with the Naturalistic explanations for it and the more Intelligent Design becomes apparent. (see,� �Evolution, A Theory in Crisis�, Michael Denton)

The basis of Life is the Cell and in the last 50 years our knowledge of it has exploded.� The Cell is not just a glob of protoplasm, but a storehouse of circuits, assembly instructions, and molecular machines. There are as many molecular machines in the human body as there are functions that the elements of the human body must perform.� Natural Selection is notably lacking in its ability to explain the construction of these molecular machines.� EG The Bacterial Flagellum consists of a rotor, stator, hook, filament etc., just as in an electric motor, which drives bacteria through a system.� It has been labeled as the most efficient machine in this universe, spinning at 100,000 rpm and able to stop in a quarter turn and reverse at the same rpm.

Irreducible Complexity = multiple component parts in a system are all essential and if you remove any one the system will not work.� The Flagellum has over 40 working parts and removing anyone will destroy it.� So, how can you build it gradually without all those parts in place at one time.� The random genetic changes must provide some advantage to the organism at each stage, if natural selection is to work.� Even the smallest possible stages, bacteria, are already too complicated to have evolved from some lower form of life.� There would be no advantages to the incomplete intermediate stages.� In actuality, Natural Selection only eliminates stages, which have no function, or less function than others, or harmful functions. It cannot produce the Flagellum (or any other irreducibly complex system). It can only work after the Flagellum exists and is operating.�

Co-option implies that Natural Selection was able to borrow components of a simpler machine and build a new more complicated machine.� In the case of the Flagellum 10 of the 40 parts are found in less complicated machines but 30 are not.� Even if there were enough existing simpler machine, there is a deeper problem - the assembly instructions.� How can all these complicated instructions be developed and executed in the precise sequence from the inside out by natural selection?� Other machines are required to regulate the assembly instructions and they themselves require other machines as well for their own assembly. The apparatus to assemble the Flagellum motor is itself irreducibly complex.� In fact, we have irreducible complexity all the way down.

Darwin is quoted,� �If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successively slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.�

Evolution Theory is about a process of change over time due to accident and natural selection, but it cannot account for the origin of Life itself.

Chemical Evolution attempted to explain how Life could have developed from simple, inorganic materials by chance.� In 1969 Dean Kenyon, Biologist, produce a book (Biological Predestination) on the possibilities of Life from non-life.� He first had to account for the development of the building blocks of Life, ie the proteins, large complex molecules that make up a living Cell.� Proteins have various roles inside the Cell eg Structure, Enzymes harvesting energy, etc., but not storing information, which is the job of DNA.� They can trigger constructions by the way their shapes fit together.� Conversely they can form into specific shapes that perform specific functions.� There are at least 30,000 distinct types of proteins each made of different combinations of the same 20 amino acids.� The amino acids are arranged into long lines/chains often hundreds of units long. If sequenced correctly these chains will form a functioning protein.� The way the amino acids collapse on each other into an architecture that is pre-programmed to do a certain function demands explanation.� All proteins in the Cell have a specific 3D structure based on the arrangement of the amino acids in the chain.� Incorrectly formed chains are destroyed in the Cell.� The mystery was to identify the source of genetic instructions.�� Was there a biochemical attraction that forced the functional arrangements?� We must explain how the first proteins were assembled without the benefit of genetic instructions.� Today we know that there is no chemical attraction, but rather a larger molecule, DNA, within the Cell, which stores the instructions for sequencing the amino acids and proteins.� DNA consists of a string of precisely sequenced chemicals identified as A, C, T, and G, which communicate information by their arrangement � �the language of Life�.

Problem: What is the origin of genetic material itself, which is found encoded in living organisms, ie of the source of the biological information in the DNA?� Can we either explain where these genetic assemblies came from or, can we explain how proteins could arise directly from amino acids without the presence of DNA?

By definition, Natural Selection could not have functioned before the first living cell existed.� It can only act on organisms capable of replicating themselves, ie Cells with DNA that pass on their genetic changes to future generations.� Without DNA there is no self-replication, but without self-replication there is no natural selection, so you cannot use natural selection to explain the origin of DNA without assuming the pre-existence of DNA, the very thing you�re trying to explain.

Chance and natural Selection and Kenyon�s theory of self-organization have all failed to explain the origin of genetic information.� There is not even the slightest chance of a chemical evolutionary origin of even the simplest of cells, so the concept of Intelligent Design is the sole explanation that very closely matches the multiple discoveries of microbiology.

Tightly wound strains of DNA are the storehouses of all the instructions necessary to build every protein in an organism.� It is precisely in the molecular genetics realm with all this information processing, where we see the most compelling evidence of creative design on this Earth

Here�s what we see inside the cell:

Transcription:� A molecular machine carefully unwinds a section of the DNA helix to expose the genetic instructions needed to assemble a specific protein molecule.� Another machine then forms a copy of these instructions known as �messenger RNA�.

When transcription is complete the slender RNA strain carries the genetic information through the nuclear pore complex � the gatekeeper for traffic in and out of the cell nucleus.� The messenger RNA strain is directed to a 2-part molecular factory called, a Rivazone.� After attaching itself securely, the process of translation begins.

Translation:� Inside the Rivazone a molecular assembly line builds a specifically sequenced chain of amino acids.� These amino acids are transported from other parts of the cell and then linked into chains often hundreds of units long.� Their sequential arrangement determines the type of protein manufactured.� When the chain is finished it is moved from the Rivazone to a barrel-shaped machine that helps fold it into the precise shape critical to its function. After the chain is folded into a protein it is then released and shepherded to the exact location where it is needed.

It is absolutely mind boggling to find at this molecular level such a finely tuned manufacturing apparatus that bears the marks of intelligent design in manufacturing.� We have the details of such a magnificently and immensely complex molecular realm of genetic information processing and its this new realm where we see the most compelling evidence of intelligent design on the Earth.

Francis Crick, Nobel Laureate, DNA Researcher, stated that, �Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they observe was not designed, but evolved.�

Science ought to be an objective search for the truth, but Evolution rules out the possibility of intelligent design as a scientific explanation = Methodological Naturalism.� Yet reason demands we attribute archeological findings to the acts of intelligent guidance.� What are the features that enable us to recognize intelligent design?� William Dembski, a mathematician, established reliably empirical criteria for this.� Intelligent Design he said, requires Improbable Complexity and it must conform to specific, objective, Recognizable Patterns. Eg faces on Mt Rushmore could not have come about by accident and they match a given pattern that indicates design.� Small Probability and Specification are what we call, �Information�.� The same type of information found in written text, numerical sequences and pictures, is also found encoded in software and radio signals.� The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence depends on finding information-rich patterns.� If astronomers ever find a signal fitting the above criteria, it will indicate the existence of intelligence elsewhere in our universe.

The DNA molecule stores more info more efficiently than anything in the known universe.� There are over 3 billion individual characters in a full complement of human DNA.� DNA�s chemical characters have a specific arrangement, which allows them to convey detailed instructions or information just as letters in a meaningful sentence.� Bill Gates said that, �DNA is just like a computer program, only much more complex than anything we have ever been able to devise.�

Conclusion:

Everything we observe suggests that information-rich systems arise from intelligent design.� Where does all the information that is in every form of life come from?� We know that Intelligence can and does produce information while we have yet to find any information produced by non-intelligent natural causes, such as: Natural Selection, Self-Organization, Time, or Pure Chance.� Logically we can infer from our observations that information exists in every living thing, that intelligent design was the cause.� Intelligent causes are real and the leave evidences of their existence.� A healthy science seeks the truth and lets the evidence speak for itself � Science must objectively report on the observation of the facts.� This evidence for Design may have religious implications but it does not depend on religious premises.� Intelligent Design is back on the table as a reasonable cause for what we observe. Yes, this has profound metaphysical implications, but so be it.

The universe is rationale and comprehensible, and it appears to be underwritten by a supreme intelligence, that meant for it to be understood.� If so, then you can expect it to make sense when you use logic and scientific method to investigate it as we are trying to do in this manuscript. In this wonderful puzzle solving project, you can expect to find rationality, complexity, and beauty right in the middle of everything.

Formerly science contended that there are two fundamental entities in the universe: Energy and Matter.� Now we know that there is a third, Information.� What we are seeing in the Information of the DNA molecule is actually an artifact of intelligence, which can only be explained by intelligent design.

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