How Did Life Begin?
To date, no scientific experiment has ever demonstrated how life on earth began. A great many ideas have been considered, and experiments conducted, but no conclusive result has ever been reached.
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Right from the start, there would have to be an enclosure. Every form of life comes in cellular units. As we think about life arising through natural forces, it is important to bear in mind that the stuff of life – proteins, DNA, etc. – must be encapsulated. Otherwise, if exposed to the elements, they are quickly broken down, destroyed, and dissipated. For example, according to one scientist, “Water quickly hydrolyzes biopolymers, including nucleic acids and proteins.”[i] Wow, to think that water itself destroys valuable parts!
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Therefore, as we think about life originating spontaneously, it is imperative to consider that all the parts of original life needed to be formed inside of a “bottle”, with all the requisite machinery present. Come up short in just one important detail, and you have a failure to launch. In addition, the cell wall needs to have several special features: Ports for admitting nutrients, other ports for eliminating waste, and if this thing is to have mobility, a flagellum.
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Again, everything must come into existence at once -- both the enclosure and all its contents. If the contents come into existence but have no container, harsh environmental elements act quickly upon them – breaking them down and dissipating them. Once damaged and separated, they cannot work their cooperative magic. On the other hand, if the container comes into existence but with no meaningful contents, this accomplishes nothing. The container and the contents must come into existence in a single moment!
We’ve all seen a ship-in-a-bottle, and we know how that is accomplished. The hobbyist builds a model ship that is “foldable”. He squeezes the ship in through the mouth of the bottle and it springs back into shape once inside. However, thinking instead of the first living cell, the difficulty lies in the fact that the enclosure must be complete (no mouth left open) and everything must be put together in an incredibly short amount of time. With the ship in the bottle example, the hobbyist can take his time inserting the ship, but with our first-time cell there is no time to lose, as the elements will attack the exposed system and its individual parts from all sides.
Apparently, both the container and guts must come into existence at once -- complete with DNA information, the machinery for reading that DNA and fabricating new proteins as needed, the acceptance and processing nutrients, storing energy, eliminating waste, trucking proteins and other materials from place to place within the cell, and a whole host of other functions. In addition, the cell wall must contain ports for accepting nutrients while keeping out other stuff, and ports where waste is expelled. A great many functions take place within even the simplest of living cells, and if any of these is not handled properly, the thing dies.
Furthermore, this cell must be able to reproduce. Otherwise, once it dies, it is gone. And from what I remember from biology class, cell division is quite a complex process. Yet, the very first living cell must have possessed this ability.
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The jump from there being no life to the existence of first life on planet earth would have to have been accomplished with the first cell and its contents coming into existence extremely fast -- in the “blink of an eye”, if you will.
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This obviously runs against evolutionary teaching, as it says everything was accomplished gradually over the years – even millions of years. They would have to say this, because to say otherwise would run counter to a cardinal rule in physics – the “conservation of information” rule, or its opposite, the law of entropy. To suggest that the first living cell popped into existence represents a sudden increase of information in that location, and this violates a natural law.
Information in classical physics is always conserved. It can neither be created nor destroyed during the evolution of the system. This result has fundamental implication for evolutionary theory!
Darwin's Contribution
It is important to realize that evolution, as described by Darwin, is a process that applies to living organisms. Before something can evolve, it must first exist. And yet people have extended the word evolution to apply to even to the appearance of life from ordinary, inorganic materials. I would suggest that this is a mistake. In Darwin’s time, and for at least 50 years thereafter, scientists were unaware of life at the cellular level. Darwin’s research and conclusions were based upon plant and animal life that he observed – whole organisms. While the microscope existed during Darwin’s time (invented by Leeuwenhoek in 1675), it did not have the power to see inside living cells. A microscope that could reveal the contents of a living cell in detail would not arrive until around 1890 – approximately 30 years after publication of Darwin’s famous book.
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​So, while Darwinists may do a good job of explaining macro-evolution, they are on shaky ground claiming that life appeared from ordinary inorganic materials. Still, they realize that they need an explanation for the origin of life. So, they speculate and discuss, as they have done for the past several decades.
A Brief Look at Actual Single-Celled Organisms
We’ve been talking about single-celled life forms, but so far with only a vague idea what they look like and what they are capable of. Why don’t we have a look now?
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The intricacy of a single-celled organisms is impressive. From “The Miracle of the Cell”, by Michael Denton: “Some cells can survive desiccation for hundreds of years. Cells possess internal clocks and can measure the passage of time. They can sense electrical and magnetic fields, and communicate via chemical and electrical signals. Some can encase themselves in armor-like skins. Some may be able to see; one species of ciliate has a lens able to focus an image on another region of the cytoplasm – in effect, an eye. All can replicate themselves with seeming ease, an act far beyond even the most complex human artifact. Some can even reconstruct themselves completely from tiny fractions cut surgically from the cell.”
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There are two main types of single-celled organisms: prokaryote and eukaryote.
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The simplest form of single-celled organism is the prokaryote. There is DNA (contained in the nucleoid), a cytoplasmic filling, a 3-layer capsule, pilus for helping the cell sense its environment and stick to a surface, cell-to-cell interactions, and DNA uptake. Yes, these little critters copulate with one another! Also, a flagellum for locomotion. (Image credit: Designua Shutterstock
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Another single-celled organism is the paramecium. You may recall this from science class in school. Paramecia are single-celled protists that are naturally found in aquatic habitats. They are typically oblong or slipper-shaped and are, again, covered with short hairy structures called cilia. Here is a diagram of a paramecium. (Image credit: Designua Shutterstock
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Cell structure
Paramecia well-organized cells, with lots of parts.
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Perhaps the most unusual characteristic of paramecia is their nuclei. "Paramecium along with the other ciliates have this rather unique feature," said James Forney, a professor of biochemistry at Purdue University. "They have two types of nuclei, which differ in their shape, their content and function."
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The two types of nuclei are the micronucleus and macronucleus. One holds a complete set of the organism’s DNA as an archive, while the other holds a “working set” of DNA – the set that is actively used to make mRNAs and proteins from those mRNAs.
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The purpose of keeping an archive copy, according to the professor, is in case something foreign got into the micronuclear genome, when the next macronucleus is made, the bad data would be removed. We should find it impressive that a feature of this exists in such a low-level organism!
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Here are a few more types of single-celled creatures.
In every life form, activities include the infusion of nutrients, breaking down those nutrients to obtain materials and energy, storing energy, retrieving energy when needed, disposing of wastes, continuously responding to the environment, and reproducing.
Reading List and Final Discussion
There has been a rush of new books in recent years on the topic of intelligent design. Authors include Douglas Axe (2 books), Michael Denton (3 books), Michael Behe (7 books), Marcos Eberlin, Jonathan Sarfati (2 books), Jonathan Wells (5 books), Rob Stadler, William Dembski (5+ books), and one book by Thaxton, Bradley, Olsen, Tour, Meyer, Wells, Gonzalez, and Miller. There is so much more information these days pointing to intelligent design, and they make solid cases. While many would like to think that intelligent design has its roots in a religious perspective, I can assure you that none of these books come from that perspective. They are science books. Let’s remind ourselves of the meaning of the word ‘science’. The root for ‘science’ is knowledge. Very simply, it means knowing. As evolutionists do not yet have an explanation for the origin of life (only speculations), they do not have a monopoly on science, and intelligent design arguments deserve to be entertained. My suggestion would be to have an open mind and read one or more of these books. (They are, by the way, well-worded and fascinating, as they describe many of the intricate systems and inner workings of life’s astonishing biosystems. For instance, with respect to sight, you will be amazed to read about the assemblage of parts involved with the reception of a single photon of light!)
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Evolutionists tend to believe that intelligent designers are pre-disposed by a belief in God and that this disqualifies them as scientists. Having read 7 or more of these books, I can assert that they make solid scientific arguments without religious underpinnings. If either side tends to an underlying religious belief, it would be the evolutionists, it seems. They have a strong belief that there is no god. To them, no god = good science. I much prefer the assertion that good knowledge = good science.
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Quoting Marcos Eberlin, “There must be a better, more general definition for science. And indeed, there is: Science is a systematic and unbiased search for knowledge about nature. Under this definition, we are free to think, investigate, doubt, and conclude based on whatever evidence we have. The underlying principles of science are freedom of thought and speech, guided by data collected using systematic methods. If science – the search for absolute truth hidden within nature – is to be considered an unflinchingly truth-directed endeavor, reason and evidence must be the only constraints.” (from Foresight, Marcos Eberlin, 2019)
A scientist looks at life at the microscopic level and asks, “How could such order and such information have come into existence?” “It looks like it was designed.” [1] Meanwhile, the evolutionist asserts that whatever happened, it wasn’t designed. But how do they know this? It seems that people’s thoughts on this matter are clouded by what they believe about God. Those who are inclined to believe in a creator God (or, at least open to that possibility) see, in nature, evidence for God’s handiwork. Those who believe there is no God see life as having assembled itself somehow, bit by bit, according to random, natural processes. However, they have not been able to show how this could have happened, even after so many decades of research.
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Quoting Michael Denton, “The origin-of-life community has identified various steps to the [construction of] the cell. It is widely accepted that four of these are the formation of basic building blocks such as the amino acids and nucleotides; their polymerization into proteins and DNA; the formation of the first primitive replicating system; and the evolution of the modern DNA and protein cell system with a functioning genetic code and an apparatus for protein synthesis. Only work on the first step has seen substantial progress. How the other steps were accomplished in terms of known laws of nature is a complete enigma. The widely acknowledged reality is that within the entire corpus of twenty-first century science, there is no explanation. Science, it seems has reached an impasse. The origin of life remains as arguably the biggest unsolved problem in science.”[2]
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[1] The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Thaxton, Bradley, Olsen, Tour, Meyer, Wells, Gonzalez, and Miller
[2] The Miracle of the Cell, Michael Denton
by Leonard Yates (c) 2022
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