A new podcast from ID the Future is worth listening to.

Participants

• Jay Richards, Director of Research at the CRSC, (Discovery Institute)
• Doug Axe, Director of the Biologic Institute

The MP3 file is here.

Topics

• the new BIO-Complexity peer-reviewed journal
• new peer-reviewed paper challenges Darwinian account of protein folding
• proteins are found in every living system
• a protein is a chain of parts called amino acids
• there are 20 amino acids used in living systems
• it’s like a 20-letter alphabet used to make sentences (proteins)
• if the sequence is just right, it folds up and has a function
• the information about the functional sequences is in the genome
• the “protein fold” is the 3D shape that a functional protein takes on
• the folding problem is good because you can TEST Darwinian mechanisms
• the problem is simple enough to be tested rigorously in a lab
• Question: how easy is it to create a sequence that folds?
• English is a good analogy to the problem of protein folding
• you have a long string of characters (e.g. – 200 letters)
• each “letter” can be one of 20 amino acids
• if you assign the letters randomly, you almost always get gibberish
• there are tons of possible sequences of different letters
• it’s like a 200 digit slot machine with each digit having 20 possibilities!
• the number of sequences that would actually make sense is tiny
• protein folding is the same
• Doug’s paper assesses how many “tries” could have been attempted
• Doug’s paper calculates the total number of possibilities
• cells have arrived a large number of functional sequences
• but only a small number of the total possibilities could have been tried
• this is called the “sampling problem”
• there isn’t enough time to test all of the possibilities (see previous paper below)
• how did living systems arrive at the functional sequences so quickly?
• there are some possible naturalistic scenarios for solving the problem
• Doug’s new paper shows that none of the naturalistic explanations work
• the only explanation left is that an intelligence sequenced the amino acids
• it is identical to the way that I can sequence letters to make this post

A picture is worth a thousand words

Here’s a video clip from the DVD Darwin’s Dilemma showing the process:

If you would like to know more about Darwin’s Dilemma, you can read Brian Auten’s review of Darwin’s Dilemma.

Who are these guys?

I wrote a post before on Doug Axe’s previous publications in the Journal of Molecular Biology, where he researched how many of the possible sequences of amino acids have biological function. His PhD is from Caltech, and his post-doctoral research on proteins was conducted at Cambridge University.

Jay Richards is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute and a Contributing Editor of The American at the American Enterprise Institute. In recent years he has been a Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a Research Fellow and Director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute. His PhD is from Princeton University.

Related posts

• The origin of the universe from nothing
• The fine-tuning of the cosmological constants to permit life
• The fine-tuning of the galaxy, solar system, and planet to permit life
• Origin of the building blocks in the simplest replicating cell
• Origin of biological information in the simplest replicating cell
• Sudden origins of all major body plans in the Cambrian explosion
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The limits on what natural selection and random mutation can do
• Peer-reviewed paper says there is no atheistic explanation for the Cambrian explosion
• Does the Cambrian explosion disprove Darwinian evolution?