The Basis Of All Life On Earth

The World They Imagine ..
Biochemist and head of nuclear medicine at Singapore General Hospital, Dr Aw says it is becoming even more difficult to believe that the first cell was produced by evolution.
There have been many such evolutionary theories, from the early days down to the present period.
But the difficulties have not decreased, they have increased, because the more we know about the cell, the more difficult it is to imagine that such an intricate thing could have just evolved by sheer random process over time without any directive force.
I suspect that many secular evolutionists have realised the futility of thinking in purely chemical evolutionary terms.
But as you know they are reluctant to change their point of view, at least in public because of the religious nature of the opinions held.
For many of them it is the anchor with which they keep to the reality of the world they imagine they are in.
And to let go, that is awfully painful.
I think they are intelligent enough to realise that there are only two views of the world.
Either it came about in the way it has been advertised, that is through chance acting on matter over long periods of time, or the alternative is the special creation told by the Scripture.
Many theistic evolutionists I know of will not even allow God to at least create the first cell.
They hold to chemical ‘chance’ evolution theories, but still somehow involve God.
I think it is because for them to admit that God directly created the first cell, they might as well admit that God created everything directly.
The more you know the cell the more you marvel at the intricacies, the regulatory mechanisms, the self-preservation of the cell which is inbuilt in addition to its complexity.
This concept of the ‘protocell,’ it’s sheer nonsense because a cell by definition must have enormous metabolic complexity or it will not survive.
It’s not just a bag of protoplasm with just fluid and a few salts and bits of furniture floating around, but it’s built to control itself and propagate itself and for that there must be a minimum complexity which is the problem for ‘chemical evolution.’
If you look at the ‘simplest’ known cell, say a bacterium, it is acknowledged by the best microbiologists and biochemists that such cells are extremely complex, with self-diagnosis and repair systems, and incredibly complex mechanisms which are still not fully understood.
People can spend their lifetime just studying the cell membrane.
Entire departments in universities study just the chemical ‘pumps’ that keep the integrity of the membrane.
I don’t see how anybody can say there is such a thing as a protocell, there just isn’t such an animal and could never have been.
The cell is made of more than just amino acids – also fats, carbohydrates, DNA, RNA and so on.
The scientists who work on origin of life problems know very well that experiments designed to produce amino acids don’t produce sugars.
And those that produce sugars don’t produce anything else, and so on.
And there is of course a problem of preservation of the molecules.
They just undergo random destruction unless they are protected, like in a cell.
The presence of building materials is one thing, the requirement of the plan to put these building materials in the proper places and get them working together is another thing.
That’s why a cell is so beautiful, so intricate.
Because of that, even non-Christian scientists marvel at that.
Even to get one single functional protein molecule to form by chance is a mathematical absurdity.
( An extract from an article by Dr Aw Swee-Eng, M.B., B.S., Ph.D.(Lond.), FRC Path., MI Biol. (Lond.) )

The Basis Of All Life On Earth ..
We all know what we mean by ‘information’ but if we were asked to define it – still less measure it – we’d probably struggle.
And how on earth would we come up with a unit of measurement for it?
Well, in 1948 someone did.
It is called the ‘Bit’ (a contraction of ‘binary digit’) and it’s the tiniest particle out of which information is made, the irreducible unit.
A Bit is something that has only two possibilities – yes or no, nought or one, heads or tails.
Working up from that simple unit, you can accurately measure how much information is contained in any message in the universe.
Not only is information, in the form of DNA, the basis of all life on Earth, it underpins everything else as well.
Matter and energy themselves are created by the way tiny particles are organised, and organisation equals information.
It was Claude Shannon, a mathematician, who came up with the idea of the Bit.
Shannon founded the field of information theory, making modern computing possible.
He made profound improvements in electronic engineering and telecommunications, designed the first chess computer and worked on computers that could reproduce themselves.