Putting a frog in a blender?
by Carl Wieland
Putting a frog in a blender? No, I don’t want you to try it. I’m rather
fond of frogs. I’m only trying to make an easy-to-understand point about a
very important part of this whole creation/evolution business.
You see, some people think that life is only a matter of the raw materials—the right
ingredients, so to speak. Kids in school often get the impression that life could
have arisen by itself a long time ago, as long as there was the right mix of chemicals
and a bit of energy.
So let’s do a thought experiment. What if someone had put
a frog in a blender? Here we would have the ideal primordial soup from which to
run an origin-of-life experiment. It doesn’t contain only a few simple building
blocks—it contains all sorts of complicated chemicals, like DNA, proteins, and more.
Now imagine that this ‘soup’ is zapped with any type of energy you like—shake
it, heat it, pass sparks through it, put it in the sun—anything at all. Not
only will it never reassemble itself into anything like the frog it once was, but
you can be absolutely, totally, positive that no living, reproducing
organism, not even the tiniest, will ever assemble itself from these ingredients.
The reason is obvious—life is more than having all the right ingredients in
the ‘soup’.
The ingredients have to be assembled in the right order according to an intelligent
plan. When that frog was conceived, born and grew up, its ‘ingredients’
were assembled according to the intelligent plan already programmed in its parents’
genes (DNA)—which in turn came from their parents, and so on. But that plan, that
programming, is not there in the raw ingredients which make up
a frog— that’s why it will not spontaneously re-form after being ‘blended’.
The most scientific conclusion one could come to is that the first living creatures
required an outside intelligence to put them together and to write the programs
to pass on to their descendants. The (hypothetical) frog in the blender shows that
even given the most suitable possible raw materials, without an intelligent plan
there is no hope that the machinery of life will arise. No matter how much or how
long it is ‘zapped’.
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