HOW CHEMISTRY AND MATHEMATICS DISQUALIFY DARWINISM

Marcos Eberlin has been called “one of the best chemists in the world today.” He is convinced that naturalistic evolutionary processes cannot account for the most basic properties of living things. For example, take the cellular membrane:

• The double-layer membrane encloses our cells. It is very flexible, but it also has high mechanical and chemical resistance. The many intricate membrane components and the capacities it possesses that are required to keep a cell alive make the appearance of foresight in the original assembly of the membrane all but overwhelming. (“Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose”)

This membrane must be in place for life to exist and to be discerning enough to recognize waste, which must be expelled, the molecules that must be welcomed and transported to their appropriate locations and those which must be denied entrance. It also has to be flexible enough to adjust to many changes, like those of temperature and acidity:

• To do all these tasks, the cell’s molecular shield also would need a mechanism to sense changes in temperature and pH, and react accordingly, adjusting the membrane’s chemical composition to handle these physical and chemical changes.

According to Eberlin, these tasks alone render improbable any possibility of a naturalistic explanation:

• If you were to bid this demanding, multifaceted job out to the most technologically advanced engineering firms in the world, their top engineers might either laugh in your face or run screaming into the night. The requisite technology is far beyond our most advanced human know-how. And remember, getting two or three things about this membrane job right—or even 99% of the job—wouldn’t be enough. It is all or death! A vulnerable cell waiting for improvements from the gradual Darwinian process would promptly be attacked by a myriad of enemies and die, never to reproduce, giving evolution no time at all to finish the job down the road.

Eberlin is amazed by how glibly and “faithfully” evolutionary theorists can construct stories about how the exact molecules can just come together:

• But such flights of fancy ignore key chemical details of what’s needed to render cellular life viable. Once we confront those details, we find that no other biomolecule appears able to sustain life by fulfilling the many intricate roles phospholipids perform.

Eberlin cannot fathom how the needed precision of the cellular membrane can arise apart from design:

• Attracted by finely tuned chemical forces, two such monolayers come together so that the tails from both layers will also contact each other in a tail-to-tail arrangement. This automatic 3-D, multi-component packing ensures that the water-hating tails are hidden from water while the water-loving heads on the outer and inner surfaces are exposed to water. Water is therefore placed inside and outside the cell, but is helpfully expelled from the interior of the phospholipid membranes that enclose the aqueous cells. Again, it’s as if a causal power with foresight anticipated this need and engineered a perfect solution.

Eberlin cites other necessary features of the membrane, which must be simultaneously present for a viable cell to exist:

• The cell membrane needs to be elastic but at the same time also mechanically and chemically resistant so that it can continuously protect the cell from its fluctuating surroundings.

Many other features have to be present simultaneously in order for the membrane to maintain the life of the cell:

• For an evolutionary model of membrane origins to work, it must account for the co-evolution of membrane-associated proteins, membrane bioenergetics, and lipid bilayers—a triple concatenated miracle. Attempts to wrestle with this question often begin with a confession of bafflement, as when A. Y. Mulkidjanian and his colleagues wrote that “the origin( s) of the membrane( s) and membrane proteins remains enigmatic.”

In addition to this, the membrane must precisely manage the intake and expulsion of water:

• One thing membrane channels must permit is the passage of water. For this essential task biomembranes contain special channels called “aquaporins.” Cells are cybernetic, multimolecular cities full of high-tech machines, power plants, and even nano-robots.

The cell membrane is, therefore, a marvel of engineering. Eberlin concludes:

• So, again, the intimation of foresight is powerful. An exquisite phospholipid membrane for the cell apparently had to be anticipated, engineered, and made available just as the cell interior appeared on the scene, lest a skinless cell meet a swift, sure end. And since early cells obviously did survive, thrive, and reproduce, leaving offspring down to the present, it is scientifically plausible to conclude that by some means this extraordinary membrane did appear on the scene in that original moment of need. Some insist it was blind fortune. I disagree and urge us to consider a second possibility—engineering foresight.

This has been called “irreducible complexity.” This concept recognizes that every part of a machine or structure must be simultaneously present for it to function. This is something that Darwinian gradualism cannot account for. Some ID theorists even argue that every part of the cell is irreducibly complex, not just the membrane.

These observations compound the problems for Darwin’s theory leaving many to conclude that it is mathematically impossible.