How Life on Earth Arose: The Unanswered Question
Until the beginning of the 19th century, people were satisfied with the answers provided by sacred texts: "God created life."
Then came Charles Darwin (1809~1882) with his theory of evolution, and suddenly everything changed. Scientists, at least at that time, were satisfied with the evolutionary model: over hundreds of millions of years, the separation between species had occurred, in each of which changes, modifications, and mutations had taken place; from the ancestral dog, many species of dogs developed, from primitive man different humanoid groups derived.
The logic of Darwinian reasoning seemed impeccable, but it did not answer the question about the origin of life; if it was possible to trace all forms of life back to a single original form, one had to explain where this primordial form came from. Clearly, from the cell, scientists said, because it is the smallest form of life. But where did the cell come from? With the answer to this question began the golden age of molecular biology: Just examine the cell, analyze it down to the smallest molecule, discover its chemical composition, to know how everything started. Modern cell research has lasted for nine decades and has provided phenomenal information about this microscopic laboratory that makes up plants and animals; but Goethe was right when he wrote that "the solution of a problem is another problem." We have discovered that the cell is essentially a cluster of chemical products: But how do these products form the specific sequence of the genetic material? How do the cell's chemical products "distinguish" the molecules that "belong" to it from those that "do not belong"? Questions like these have led us to probe the chemical beginnings of evolution.
Today evolutionary research follows three lines of inquiry.
- Chemical evolution: detachment of chemical materials from the primordial rock.
- Molecules self-organize into cells capable of multiplying: but how do living cells arise from "dead chemistry"?
- Development of individual species, i.e., Darwinian evolution.
According to Manfred Eigen, chemistry is subject to the laws of physics. Physics has highlighted that every particle of matter carries negative or positive charges. This law also applies to molecules, which should, depending on the case, attract or repel each other. The same has occurred in the processes of macromolecules, which have obeyed the laws of physics: the furious effort made to grasp the remarkable chance in evolutionary terms should be retired. What is frustrating about this solution offer is the fact that in a primordial soup, chains of molecules formed only to then dissolve again, as if they were stains soaking in detergent. The formation of a cell requires many proteins, the smallest of which has at least 239 molecules. A protein molecule is thus composed of various amino acids and enzymes, which must all be in a fixed sequence.
The improbability of this spontaneously arranging itself into a rigid sequence was suggested by Professor James F. Coppedge, former director of the Center for Probability Calculation in Northbridge (California): according to the scientist, this corresponds to a probability of one in ten to the twenty-third power (1:1023, that is 1:10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.0) Enough to make one throw up their hands!
The miraculous case already occurred at the birth of the first cell because it seems to have formed under special conditions: primordial soup and primordial atmosphere. The primordial atmosphere was nothing like the air we breathe today; it was primarily composed of methane (perhaps fire damp) and ammonia. In such a mixture, oxygen was a deadly poison to the cell. If the first cells had developed in an atmosphere of methane and ammonia, oxygen would have killed them: this is a widely held opinion. Why do textbooks not discuss this? Why is a veil of silence drawn over the results of chemical-biological experiments? Why are the mathematical calculations not made public? We have thus made a small foray into prebiotic biology and chemistry and here in the antechamber of the brain, an idea wanders:
A cell can only multiply if it contains a (albeit modest) DNA program,
Which program will be transmitted, as if it were the baton in a relay race, from one cell to another, until it gives rise to a simple form of life, for example, a bacterium. But a bacterium is already a complete form of life, which has a specific function and therefore must have already inherited the genetic program from the DNA of the first cell. Where did the program that was present in the first bacterial cell come from, and that was used to build the complete bacterium? Who ordered the DNA of the first cell to make a bacterium?
By what "abracadabra" has a bacterium transformed into another with completely different functions?
Professor Harold Morowitz, a physicist at Yale University (USA), calculates that the chances for a very simple bacterium to have undergone completely random mutations are 1:10100,000,000,000. So many zeros that it would take days and days to count them!
Darwinism is a mistake
Professor Bruno Vollmert holds a chair in macromolecular chemistry at the University of Karlsruhe.
He is also the director of the Polymer Institute at the same university. Polymer chemistry deals with the synthesis of plastics, which are composed of large chain molecules. Macromolecules like DNA are the "domain" of molecular chemists: they should understand its genesis. For decades, Vollmert and his colleagues have searched for the origin of DNA in well-equipped laboratories.
The results of the studies have knocked out the evolutionists: DNA could not have arisen by itself.
Vollmert asserts that dealing with polymers, a chemist can neither believe nor make others believe that macromolecular chains like DNA spontaneously arose in the primordial soup; the same applies to the development, over the history of the planet, of the chains of deoxyribonucleic acid from one class of animals to another. Darwinism is therefore an ideology, not a proven scientific theory: this is why Darwinism is considered a fatal error; its enormous success is due to the eternal anthropocentric dream. Usually, science claims to be exact, and it insists that the whims of chance are excluded from its theories. However, by coincidence, random events are always "welcome" when they represent a convenient solution. Not all the bricks of science are well-fired: since the origin of life is far from identified, certain scholars try to have it emerge from the "abyss" of their knowledge. At this point, we wonder if enzymes could have come through chemical evolution from a terrestrial primordial soup.
Let's suppose that the soup contains twenty biologically important amino acids in the same concentration. Calculating conservatively, to underestimate, let's say that each enzyme needs ten digits to function well biologically. If so, it takes twenty attempts to the tenth power (2010) to produce a functioning enzyme; and if probability and chance give us N of these enzymes, we would have 1:2010N. Even before N equals 100, the attempts would surpass the number of atoms contained in all the stars of the universe! Thus, we find ourselves "forced" to think that life is a Cosmic phenomenon...
Life as a consequence of cosmic phenomena? If so, which phenomena? No one knows, and humanity will not be at peace until an answer is found. We only know that at the base of everything alive is the cell; the cell is made of macromolecules, macromolecular chains are composed of atoms, and atoms have a number of subatomic particles. Subatomic particles are the universe of ceaseless motion and widespread radiation (Example: an electron vibrates 1023 times a second). We leave the material world and enter a world that our minds can't even imagine,
a world some call God and others spirit. We are continually immersed in a cosmos of radiations that bombard us: did they write the program of the molecular chains?
Did they make life vibrate in dead matter?
