Latest Structural Biology Findings Point to Intelligent Design
The August 9, 2021 edition of Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) featured an article from the field of structural biology titled “How Transcription Begins.”
Transcription is a biochemical process that occurs in every cell in the human body when protein synthesis begins. It is a complex series of processes that begins in the nucleus when a gene, a section of a strand of DNA, gives instructions for the production of a particular protein.
Structural biology is a branch of molecular biology, biochemistry, and biophysics that studies the structure of biological macromolecules, particularly proteins and nucleic acids.
Simply put, the part of the DNA molecule where the gene is found unfolds, resulting in a strand of mRNA (messenger RNA). An mRNA can be thought of as a digital tape containing a sequence of three-letter codes called codons that dictate the exact sequence of amino acids for the protein to be made.
The mRNA leaves the nucleus and enters the site of protein synthesis called the ribosome. Here, codons are read and specific amino acids are delivered by a second RNA molecule, tRNA (transfer RNA), which has its own three-letter sequences called anticodons that correspond to codons in the mRNA.
The process continues; the ribosome continues to assemble amino acids one by one until the protein is assembled according to the instructions originally written in the gene.
To say that this process is amazing in its complexity is an understatement. This is nothing more than a miracle.
The C&EN article details more than 20 years of efforts by various research groups around the world to understand the transcription initiation process.
They found that it included a so-called preinitiation complex (PIC); a set of transcription factors, an enzyme called RNA polymerase II (Pol II), more transcription factors, and a mediator complex that stabilizes the structure. In total, there are about 75 different proteins.
To get a PIC image, it had to be done first. This required “years of hard work by research teams who not only developed methods to isolate all the protein components of PIC in the laboratory, but also got these components assembled the right way, without the entire complex collapsing.” crumble”.
This raises a deeper philosophical question: how can such a complex molecular machine, crucial for protein synthesis and therefore life, depend on 75 different proteins? Where did these proteins come from if there was no PIC to initiate protein synthesis?
Or what came first, the chicken or the egg
Douglas Axe, author of Undeniably How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Created, says it’s examples like this that make it clear that life was created and not the result of blind, unguided chance.
“Explaining how natural proteins, with their exquisite functions, could have arisen by accident is a monumental task,” he writes.
“When we see how things that came about through the right connection of many parts work, we can’t help but attribute these inventions to purposeful actions, and this puts our intuition at odds with the evolutionary explanation.”
He gives an example called “oracle soup” – a reference to the primordial soup – “a small warm pool”, which is considered the birthplace of life on planet Earth and which Darwin described in a letter to his friend Joseph Hooker. in 1871.
The Aix recipe involves using a large pot of broth and letters of pasta, which are brought to a boil, then removed from the heat and allowed to cool. When the soup is cold, “…lift the lid to reveal a full set of instructions for making something new and useful, patent-worthy, all written in pasta letters.”
“How would we understand the meaning of the fortune telling soup if it were real? If we think about it for a moment, I think we’ll agree that no ordinary explanation will seem adequate for something so unusual. But if this is so, how can an evolutionary explanation of life not inspire the same skepticism? ”
John Patrick, who served as a medical missionary in Jamaica and sub-Saharan Africa where he studied childhood malnutrition, recently shared his story when he was invited as a visiting professor of ethics at a medical university in Cuba.
The school principal noticed how distrustful the students were during Dr. Patrick’s lectures, and to better understand the reason for this, he challenged Dr. Patrick to a debate on the origin of life.
Dr. Patrick, always up for a good challenge, wrote on the board (in Spanish) “This sentence is written by himself.”
A group of doctors and medical students discussed the nonsense of such a claim for several minutes, until finally Dr. Patrick deleted the phrase “This is a sentence” and replaced it with “DNA,” adding, “But you all believe in this statement. don’t you think?”
There was total silence in the room as the meaning was elegantly conveyed.
I have a similar mind Game that I play with students in an introductory chemistry course that I teach. As we begin to study protein synthesis, I show you a photo of my box of ties before my wife spent an hour organizing it, folding all the ties and neatly arranging them into three colored rows.
No student ever thought that it happened by blind, unguided accident, and that it could never have happened this way if we had a little time.
The lesson is clear: behind the organized arrangement was someone intelligent, capable of combining colors and skillfully folding the fabric. It can be said that my wife acted as a reasonable designer.
The belief in God as an intelligent designer became the starting point for much scientific research in the 16th and 17th centuries.
“The great pioneers of physics – Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus – piously considered themselves called to find evidence of God in the physical world,” writes Stephen S. Mayer in God’s Return. Meyer in Resurrection of the God Hypothesis, his last book, in which he convincingly defends the Judeo-Christian origins of modern Science.
“The founders… assumed that if they studied nature closely, it would reveal its secrets. His confidence in this assumption was based on both the Greek and Judeo-Christian ideas that the universe is an ordered system: the cosmos, not chaos.
This cosmos, described as “a world with a pattern,” was open to seeking great scientific minds. Take, for example, the astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), who wrote:
“God wanted us to know” the natural laws, and God made it possible by “creating us in his image and likeness, so that we might share his thoughts.”
Thus, the assumption that a rational mind with a will created the universe gave rise to two ideas: chance and rationality, which, in turn, served as a powerful incentive to study nature with the certainty that such study would lead to comprehension.
This powerful drive to explore nature goes hand in hand with curiosity and critical thinking, often leading to deeper, more philosophical questions about the origins and meaning of life.
Unfortunately, faith and Science died out in the mid-19th century with the writings of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, sometimes referred to as the “Four Bearded God-Killers.”
Venki Ramakrishnan was one of three co-authors awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their studies on the function and structure of the ribosome.
In The Gene Machine, The Race to Unravel the Secrets of the Ribosome, he writes that his own research led him to reflect on the deeper question of the origin of life.
How life began is one of the great remaining mysteries of biology… The problem [is] that in almost all forms of life, DNA carries genetic information, but DNA itself is inert and is produced by a large amount of protein enzymes, which require more than just RNA to create, but also the ribosome.
Also, the sugar in DNA, deoxyribose, is made from ribose by a large, complex protein. No one can understand how this whole system could have started.
Well, hardly anyone.
Think of the irony of the C&EN article: For 20 years, research teams in the US, Germany and China, made up of some of the world’s brightest biochemists, have been working in state-of-the-art laboratories with advanced biological Technology. . reagents, using instrumentation to synthesize even larger and more complex biomechanical machines in order to image and elucidate the structure of the PIC.
Or, to put it another way: Intelligent Design teams worked in intelligently designed laboratories, using intelligently designed raw materials and instruments, to elucidate the structure of one of the biomechanical machines involved in the early stages of protein synthesis.
Obviously, it is worth considering the question that God himself asked Job in the Old Testament book that bears his name:
“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you understand” (Job 38:4, NIV).
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