This article is from
Creation 23(4):42–43, September 2001

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Copy challenge

Can evolution even begin to explain the near-miracle of even the simplest reproduction?

by Alexander Williams

Rob Shenk, wikimedia

Scientists at the University of California in Berkeley have embarked on a research project to create an artificial ‘housefly’ that can fly around in dangerous or small spaces, such as collapsed buildings, and send back sensory information on what it finds. In studying the way that houseflies accomplish their amazing aerobatic feats, one worker remarked that ‘they are the most skilful flyers on the planet’.¹

Indeed, man’s attempts to imitate nature show up the huge gap that lies between us and our Creator. It is only when we start to come close to such feats as flying that we begin to understand the vast achievements of our Creator God.

The Berkeley team hope to have a flying prototype ready within a couple of years. They have already solved a number of problems such as finding materials that are strong, flexible and light enough to endure the huge forces that are involved in flying. But the navigating challenge is looming rather larger. It looks simple enough, once you can fly, to zoom around wherever you want. But appearances are deceptive, and several more years of research will be required to solve the navigation problem.

But even a flying, navigating, sensing and communicating artificial housefly comes nowhere near to the real thing. Until we can make an organism that can reproduce itself (either sexually or by making a copy of itself), we won’t even come close to appreciating what the Creator has done.

Reproduction goes on zillions of times every day all around us, but few have any idea of the complexity that is involved in accomplishing it. Bacteria can reproduce a complete copy of themselves in about 20 minutes. Generation time in humans is about 25 years² (which raises the question–what advantage would bacteria gain by evolving into creatures such as us?).

Darwinian evolution is said to occur via a long series of small changes, but we will see that no process of reproduction could ever have come into existence in a piecemeal, stepwise fashion.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s imagine that reproduction requires just 10 biochemical steps.³ Now imagine the primordial proto-organism that has somehow managed to create itself out of primordial soup (an impossibility, but let’s imagine it anyway). If it then managed to gain just one of the reproductive steps, it would fail to reproduce and would die without leaving any offspring; life would never have started on the Earth. Suppose it gained two of the required steps. Again, it would still fail to reproduce. Even if it were to gain all 10 steps, the process would still fail unless all the steps were in the right order.

Now it is surprisingly difficult to get even a simple 10-step process right, because there are many ways of getting it wrong!

In a sequence of 10 steps there are 10 possible positions for the first step to occur in (but of course the ‘first’ step must be in the first position for the process to work—a one-in-ten chance). Then there are nine possible positions for the second step to occur in, and so on. So there are 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 3,628,800 possible ways of arranging 10 items; 3,628,799 of the ways are wrong, and only one is right. So the chance of getting it right first time is just one chance in 3,628,800!⁴

But even in a bacterium, one of the simplest forms of life on Earth, there are large numbers–many more than 10–of steps involved in reproduction. In Haemophilus influenzae, for example, there are 87 genes (‘sentences’ of genetic information encoded on DNA that carry the instructions to specify one particular protein) that deal with just the process of replicating the DNA alone,⁵ without regard to all the other cellular machinery that is needed for reproduction.

Of course, each gene is itself not just a one-step object, but consists of thousands of chemical letters, also in a specific sequence. But even ignoring this, the chance of getting just 87 steps in the right sequence is only 1 in 10¹⁷⁰, a number so large that scientists have no use for it (there are only about 10⁸⁰ atoms in the whole known universe).

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And once you manage to reproduce the DNA, you have to untangle it in order to pull the two copies apart! DNA molecules are very, very long and are packed in supercoils into a very tiny space in the chromosomes of the cell nucleus. A special enzyme⁶ is required to untangle the two copies of the DNA. If this enzyme (topoisomerase) is not present, or is produced too early or too late in the process, it would not do its job and the cell would die without reproducing. The right enzymes have to be produced in the right place, at the right time, or the whole process fails.⁷

So you can see, even from this very brief analysis, that unless the reproductive system was designed as a whole, and was intact to start with, having all the parts present and working, and in the correct sequence, then the proto-organism would have failed to reproduce itself and life would never have started on Earth. The reproductive process could never have come into existence in a stepwise, piecemeal manner as Darwinian evolution requires.

The fact that living things do exist and reproduce themselves in an extraordinarily diverse number of ways can only mean one thing–they were designed from the beginning to do what they do. And what they do, they do exceedingly well. A dramatic testimony to the wisdom, power and skill of their Creator.