Non-theists are committed to the idea that the building blocks of life emerged spontaneously from chemicals on the early Earth. Well, Dr. James Tour and a couple of colleagues have written a new article that argues that proteins and RNA both break down faster than they can be formed in a realistic early Earth environment. To get them formed, you would need an intelligent designer.

Before we get to the paper, I should say what a protein is. A protein is a chain of amino acids. If you imagine a chain of kid’s blocks that can chain together, then the amino acids are the blocks, and the chain of blocks is the protein. Once the chain of amino acids is long enough, it can fold up into a shape to do things in the body. BUT the chain only folds into a useful shape if the sequence of blocks is in the right order. It’s similar to how Scrabble letters can form words and sentences. If the amino acids make meaningful words and sentences, then they will fold up, and be useful. Otherwise, they are junk.

RNA is like a messenger that reads recipes out of a book of recipes (DNA) and carries them to the kitchen (cells) where the recipes can be followed to make dishes. The recipe tells the kitchen how to put the blocks (amino acids) together to make a protein chain (a meal). Without RNA, the body wouldn’t know how to build the right proteins to perform biological functions. Again, the RNA itself is another chain, but this time it’s a chain of nucleotides. Nucleotides are also like letters, but more complex than amino acids.

So, the paper is asking the question: could these chains of components arise in the early Earth, without an intelligent designer to arrange them?

The paper was published in the journal BioCosmos, and it’s posted on Sciendo. You can read the full text and even download the PDF.

Anyway, Evolution News reported on the article, and here is what they said:

Rice University chemist James Tour, along with co-authors M. C. Parker and C. Jeynes, recently published an article in BioCosmos titled “Thermodynamic Limitations on the Natural Emergence of Long Chain Molecules: Implications for Origin of Life.” The study demonstrates that proteins and RNA degrade at rates that render their spontaneous formation under natural, undirected conditions highly implausible. To date, no origin-of-life researcher has provided a substantive response to the thermodynamic challenges outlined in the paper.

The early Earth environment is a much more messy place than a university lab, and as a result, chains tend to break down. It would be like trying to chain together blocks while running or swimming.

The authors calculate the decay time of proteins and RNA, to see how quickly they break down. And it turns out that the longer the chain is, the faster it breaks down.

Here’s how Evolution News explains it:

More specifically, the half-life of a dipeptide — two amino acids linked by a peptide bond, as found in proteins — is approximately 7 years. Therefore, a polypeptide chain of 200 amino acids, which is typical for many functional proteins, has a half-life of only 13 days. The situation is even more severe for RNA. A chain of two nucleotides has a half-life of about 100 days, meaning that an RNA strand of 200 nucleotides would degrade in roughly 12 hours. Both classes of molecules decay far more rapidly than they could plausibly form under natural conditions, making their spontaneous emergence highly unlikely in any undirected origin-of-life scenario.

The key point again is that the longer the chain gets, the faster it breaks down. But how fast is the building up rate?

In comparison to a protein’s half-life, the rate of polypeptide chain elongation under prebiotic conditions is very long. Yang et al. (2025) identify numerous barriers to sustained polypeptide growth, including the formation of non-peptide linkages and cyclic structures, stringent environmental requirements, and unfavorable thermodynamics. Their analysis establishes that the rate of growth must be far smaller than one added amino acid per chain per day.

Even assuming one addition each day, synthesizing a protein of 200 amino acids would require over six months. However, the growing chain would almost certainly degrade in a much shorter time span. The challenge is even greater for RNA, which has a significantly shorter half-life and encounters additional chemical and structural hurdles during formation.

So the building up rate for proteins and RNA is much slower than the breaking down rate.

I’m not a biochemist, I’m a software engineer. So my job is to try to come up with a good analogy for you so that you remember this well enough to use it in a conversation, later. After all, we must help the evolutionists to come to their senses!

Imagine building a tall tower of toy blocks on a windy beach. You carefully stack each block (amino acids or nucleotides) to make a protein or RNA chain, but it’s slow work—maybe one block a day. Meanwhile, big waves (the harsh early Earth environment) keep crashing in, knocking your tower down faster than you can build it. For a 200-block tower (a functional protein), it’d take months to stack, but waves destroy it in days (protein half-life: 13 days). For RNA, it’s even worse—your tower collapses in hours (half-life: 12 hours)! Without a skilled builder (an intelligent designer) shielding and guiding the process, the tower will never get built.

Well, I think this is a very interesting piece of work these gentlemen have put together, so we shall see how good of a job the other side does at finding an answer. If you have ever seen Dr. Tour debate, he likes to draw a formula on the chalkboard, and then hand the chalk to his opponent and ask them to solve it. Will they be able to solve this problem? If not, then they should quit being so bold about their naturalistic view of life!

I wanted to share a story from the book “Right Turns“, written by Jewish conservative talk show host Michael Medved. In the story, he explains how his uncle got him to accept one of the most important lessons of life.

He tells the story of having a special dinner with his Uncle Moish in chapter 7:

He took special interest in me from the beginning because, he claimed, he saw a chance with me to redeem past mistakes and to do a better job in shaping a finished product than he had done in “raising” his kid brother, my father. I appreciated my uncle’s solicitous attention… Nevertheless, I was only eleven and found it difficult to ignore my other pressing priorities, most notably, my obsession with tacky science fiction movies. I began to pester Uncle Moish to take me to see a heavily advertised shocker called The Brain from Planet Arous.

To my surprise, Moish at least kept the door open to the idea that he would escort me to The Brain from Planet Arous. But first he insisted on taking me out to dinner at a “fancy restaurant” for a very important and very serious conversation.

I dressed up in my one suit for this solemn occasion and remember the discomfort of a too-tight tie and the too-snug shoulders during our steak dinner. Moish allowed me to order absolutely anything I wanted from the menu—in contrast to my unfailingly cost-conscious mother on those rare occasions when I went out to eat with my parents. Looking around that shiny, busy dining room, with all the well-dressed and prosperous adults, I remember feeling conscious of my status as the only kid in the place. After dinner, feeling very important and grown up, I ordered dessert before my uncle leaned his long, serious face conspiratorially across the table.

“Now is the time, Mike, for the talk we need to have. Maybe your parents think you’re too young, or they don’t want you to hear. But I think you’re ready. I think you need it. I think you are going to remember.”

[…]“First of all, let me ask you. Have you ever heard of the Scarlet Plague?”

“I know about the Black Death, Uncle Moish. That was the disease that killed all those people in the Middle Ages.”

‘That’s very good. but no, the Scarlet Plague is even worse. It’s not about the Middle Ages. It’s about right now, and fifty years ago. It kills more people, ruins more lives, than any other disease. And the worst part about it is the people who are most likely to get sick, and who are going to suffer the most, are the brightest minds, the biggest idealists, the natural leaders of this world. They are people just like you.”

I warmed to his compliment, and tried to smile away my fear and discomfort.

“The Scarlet Plague is Communism. It’s Scarlet because they call themselves Reds, and also that is the color of blood. And there’s blood everywhere with the Communists, of the people they kill, that they torture and they cripple. I know because I saw it myself—I saw it starting in Russia before we got out in 1924. But not only Russia, you know. It’s everywhere. It’s in America. It’s in Israel. Especially with intellectuals! If you’re not ready for it, you may get infected—so you have to understand.”

And he went on to lay out the most gripping, convincing, and altogether persuasive case against the Communists and their lies and their cruelty and they insatiable lust for power and destruction. More than a decade later, when I first read Solzhenitsyn’s epochal (and then brand new) Gulag Archipelago, I thought of my Uncle Moish making the same sort of case, with equal passion, in that ritzy restaurant in Philadelphia. l tried to remember all the names and dates and stories he told me, but the underlying message emerged more clearly than any details. I knew something about “The Cold War” and the threat from the Soviet Union, but Moish made the danger feel far more immediate, insidious, almost supernatural.

“And when you tell your father that we had this talk—and you should tell him—he’ll just laugh and make fun of me. He’d tell you not to worry. He thinks because the Reds never infected him that there’s nothing to worry about. He’s too relaxed about everything! Because he doesn’t know the way they’re going to go after you— I know they will!—and they’re going to go after millions and millions of other people in your generation. Your father doesn’t take it seriously but I need you to take it seriously. I need you to be prepared. You’re In the Boy Scouts, right? ‘Be prepared’ is the motto! Be ready to fight back against the Scarlet Plague!”

It all seemed impossibly heavy and melodramatic, as if Moish worried that my mostly Republican, middle-class San Diego world had already been infested with active cells of preteen Commie agents. Nevertheless, I promised to heed his lecture and to keep his pleas in mind in the years ahead.

And amazingly enough, I did. Less than six years after the diatribe, I was surrounded in college by honest-to-goodness leftist lunatics, and in trying to deal with the psychos from the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), I thought repeatedly of my uncle’s warnings about the Scarlet Plague… I’d like to believe that I would have rejected extremist temptations even without my uncle’s warnings, but as I made progress in my political journey, his unforgettable harangue seemed more and more prescient, even profound.

I read the book about 20 years ago and the story stuck with me.

Michael Medved is a very successful talk show host. He reaches a wide audience, including a lot of religious and secular Jews with his conservative message. And he promotes  scholars who work on intelligent design in science, like Dr. Stephen C. Meyer. What a huge difference his Uncle made. He knew the importance of winning a person using ALL the tools that you have available. You can’t rely on daycare, public schools, celebrities, athletes and artists to communicate important truths to young people. You must do it. And if you have something important to say, then spend your time and money and effort making sure you are heard.

In 2012, I blogged about a ground-breaking studying on the effects of same-sex parenting on children. At the time, Big LGBT went ballistic at this study, alleging all sorts of flaws in it. Well, here we are in 2025, and a new statistical analysis of the 2012 study has vindicated it. And that’s putting it mildly.

Before we go too far, let’s go back to my initial post and get the conclusion. I quoted the Washington Times so:

Using a new, “gold standard” data set of nearly 3,000 randomly selected American young adults, Dr. Regnerus looked at their lives on 40 measures of social, emotional and relationship outcomes.

He found that, when compared with adults raised in married, mother-father families, adults raised by lesbian mothers had negative outcomes in 24 of 40 categories, while adults raised by gay fathers had negative outcomes in 19 categories.

Findings such as these do not support claims that there are “no differences” between gay parenting and heterosexual, married parents, said Dr. Regnerus, who helped develop the New Family Structures Study at the university.

Instead, “children appear most apt to succeed well as adults when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father, and especially when the parents remain married to the present day,” he wrote.

In that same year, his study did get early vindication from other scientists, and later by the University of Texas, Austin.

The new report vindicating his earlier study comes from The Public Discourse.

They start by describing the new statistical method of analysis:

Recently a statistical critique by Cornell sociologists Cristobal Young and Erin Cumberworth examined how small, invisible methodological choices, such as how categories are classified or extreme cases are handled, yielded very different results in published studies. They did this by examining the results of every possible reasonable permutation of such choices—what they called, with a nod to Spiderman, the “multiverse of analyses”—to show where on the range of possible outcomes landed the outcome reported. This procedure shone a bright light on exaggeration or bias due to hidden analytical decisions.

And here is what this method found about the Regnerus study:

As a kind of stress test, the authors devoted a chapter to reexamining the “now infamous” 2012 study by University of Texas (Austin) sociologist Mark Regnerus which “found that the children of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) parents, compared to those raised in ‘intact biological families’ (IBFs), were worse off in many sociodevelopmental ways”—which they succinctly term the “LGBT effect” (though inaccurately: transgender persons (T) were not studied).

The widespread critique of this highly disputed study resulted in a multiverse of more than two million alternative analyses that were statistically significant (meaning the results could not be the result of chance variation due to random sampling). Initially anticipating that “a comprehensive multiverse analysis would drive [the study’s many critics’] point home in a powerfully conclusive way,” Young and Cumberworth instead found something unexpected and remarkable: not one of the two million significant alternatives resulted in positive outcomes for LGBT-parented children.

Although often with smaller effects, every analysis confirmed the Regnerus study’s central finding that children turned out better with intact biological parents than with LGBT parents. Regnerus’s thesis, it turns out, was not only true in the analytic model in which he presented it: it was true in every analytic model possible.

What was most interesting about the Public Discourse report is how the author went back and looked at the early criticism of the study. I really like when conservatives are mean about these things. Many, many people who are raised conservative get worn down in college to centrism or leftism, just because they perceive that there are social costs to being conservative. So, when we find out that we were right, we need to show some swagger a little bit. We need to make sure people watching know the score.

Here’s a sample:

In a pattern now familiar from other culture war issues, the social science journals became flooded with weak, misleading “studies,” often written by politically motivated gay authors, purporting to show that children fared just as well with same-sex parents as with other-sex ones. A primary tactic was to ask obviously biased samples of gay parents recruited from gay bookstores, advertisements in gay-themed newspapers, pride events, and similar sources, how their children were doing, then treat this a representative of all gay-parented children. Rarely were the children themselves examined or even consulted.

The “studies” also typically drew samples too small to show any differences between gay-parented and other children even if they existed, then misstated their failure to find differences as a strong conclusion that none existed. One review counted that of the forty-seven studies of gay parenting before 2010, only four used a random sample, and most sample sizes of gay-parented children were fewer than fifty.

In study after study, absence of evidence was presented as evidence of absence, feeding a growing consensus, despite the lack of real evidence, that there were “no differences” that mattered for the wellbeing of children raised by same-sex parents and those raised by their own mother and father.

The use of “studies” by the secular left was all entertainment. It was basically no better than showing “Will and Grace” episodes, or other propaganda TV shows designed to make disagreement with the LGBT agenda look stupid and uninformed.

I say this because I’ve now spent 25 years working full-time in the competitive field of information technology. I had so many experiences of white Christian software engineers who were raised in married Christian homes, who attended private Christian schools, and went to church. The minute they hit college, they were walloped with LGBT propaganda. And they caved. It didn’t matter that they were natural born Americans, tall, white, handsome, etc. They caved, because they didn’t have the evidence to fight back.

In fact, in the workplace, supposed intolerance of LGBT is the first thing that they threw at me. Naturally, I was ready. But they had the impression that there were billions of studies of gay parenting that showed that they were equal to opposite sex biological married parents. Ridiculous. But I am so happy to see the Regnerus study get vindicated like this. This whole theme of “don’t judge” that tears people away from the Bible needs to be defeated. And by secular evidence. Not by Bible verses.

If you liked this post, I would really recommend that you share the article from The Public Discourse. Same-sex marriage needs to be overturned. And data is how we do it.