Summer’s here, and the time is right…

May 7th, 2006 Black Ops Posted in Commentary |

SO HERE YOU ARE, thinking you’ve got your summer vacation all planned out, packing your bags to take the kids to Dinosaur Adventure Land, when suddenly you realize your vacation is in jeopardy due to Kent Hovind’s inability to understand and/or abide by A) the tax codes, and; B) building codes. Damn you, Dr. Dino! Now where are you gonna take the rug monkeys for their dose of Genesis?

No worries, friends. Have you considered Jollye Olde Englande, birthplace of the silent “e”, and home of Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm? Take it away, Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm staff:

Could bacteria just happen?

A soup of chemicals would first have to occur, then would have to become an amino acid. There are 20 different natural amino acids, these would all have to come together to make proteins. An amino acid would have to become 100 amino acids.

But each amino acid needs a peptide bond to join with other amino acids of the same chain. Peptide and non-peptide bonds occur equally, yet we need only peptides to work. The probability of getting 4 peptides in a row is ½ x ½ x ½ x ½. The likelihood of getting 100 peptides in a row is ½¹⁰⁰ or 1 in 10³⁰ (10 with 29 0’s after it). Also, laboratory-made amino acids have a mirror image of themselves, left handed and right, also occurring. But proteins in cells are only made up of left handed amino acids. The likelihood of all left occurring is another 1 in 10³⁰

A protein, the simplest needing to be formed out of 100 amino acids, would need many other sorts of proteins to make the simplest bacterium. A bacterium would need all its proteins, including ATP enzymes, in precisely the right place with a membrane round them, along with DNA that carries its ability to reproduce itself and carry out a function. It is irreducibly complex. That is, you can’t have a half or three quarters of a bacterium. It must, like a mousetrap, all be there to work.

However, proteins need their 100 or more amino acids linked in the right order, like letters in a sentence. If one is wrong the protein will not work.

Unpacking the (all too typical, sadly) stupidity in this sort of calculation is left as an exercise for the reader. Hey, at least they have a couple of rhinos…