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The chemical evolution of life is ridiculously improbable. What could improve the odds? One should begin with an earth having high concentrations of the key elements comprising life, such as carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen [a]. However, the closer one examines these elements, the more unlikely evolution appears.

Carbon. Rocks that supposedly preceded life have very little carbon [b]. One must imagine a toxic, carbon-rich atmosphere to supply the needed carbon if life evolved. For comparison, today's atmosphere holds only 1/80,000 of the carbon that has been on the earth's surface since the first fossils formed.

Oxygen. No evolutionary theory has been able to explain why earth's atmosphere has so much oxygen. Too many substances should have absorbed oxygen on an evolving earth [c]. Besides, if the early earth had oxygen in its atmosphere, compounds (called amino acids) needed for life to evolve would have been destroyed by oxidation [d]. But if there had been no oxygen, there would have been no ozone (a form of oxygen) in the upper atmosphere. Without ozone to shield the earth, the sun's ultraviolet radiation would quickly destroy life [e]. The only known way for both ozone and life to be here is for both to come into existence simultaneously-in other words, by creation.

a. The four most abundant chemical elements, by weight, in the human body are oxygen (65%), carbon (18%), hydrogen (10%), and nitrogen (3%).

b. Carbon is only the 18th most abundant element, by weight, in the earth's crust. Furthermore, almost all carbon is tied up in organic matter, such as coal and oil, or in sediments deposited after life began, such as limestone or dolomite.

c. "The cause of the initial rise in oxygen concentration presents a serious and unresolved quantitative problem." Leigh Van Valen, "The History and Stability of Atmospheric Oxygen," Science, Vol. 171, 5 February 1971, p. 442.

d. Since 1930, knowledgeable evolutionists have realized that life could not have evolved in the presence of oxygen. If no oxygen was in the atmosphere as life evolved, how did the atmosphere get its oxygen?

Cyanobacteria break down carbon dioxide and water and release oxygen. In 1987, William J. Schopf claimed that he and his graduate student had discovered fossils of 3.4-billion-year-old cyanobacteria. This, he said, is how the atmosphere gained its oxygen after these bacteria-shielded by a shallow sea from ultraviolet radiation-evolved. Evolutionists eagerly accepted this long-awaited discovery as a key part of their theory of how life evolved.

Schopf's former graduate student and other experts have now charged Schopf with withholding evidence that those fossils were not cyanobacteria. Most experts feel betrayed by Schopf, who now accepts that his "specimens were not oxygen-producing cyanobacteria after all." [See Rex Dalton, "Squaring Up over Ancient Life," Nature, Vol. 417, 20 June 2002, pp. 782-784.] A foundational building block in the evolution story-that had become academic orthodoxy-has crumbled.

e . Hitching, p. 65.

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a. An authoritative study concluded that the early biosphere contained oxygen before the earliest fossils (bacteria) formed. Iron oxides were found that "imply a source of oxygen enough to convert into insoluble ferric material the ferrous solutions that must have first formed the flat, continuous horizontal layers that can in some sites be traced over hundreds of kilometers." Philip Morrison, "Earth's Earliest Biosphere," Scientific American, Vol. 250, April 1984, pp. 30-31.

Charles F. Davidson, "Geochemical Aspects of Atmospheric Evolution," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 53, 15 June 1965, pp. 1194-1205.

Steven A. Austin, "Did the Early Earth Have a Reducing Atmosphere?" ICR Impact, No. 109, July 1982.

"In general, we find no evidence in the sedimentary distributions of carbon, sulfur, uranium, or iron, that an oxygen-free atmosphere has existed at any time during the span of geological history recorded in well-preserved sedimentary rocks." Erich Dimroth and Michael M. Kimberley, "Precambrian Atmospheric Oxygen: Evidence in the Sedimentary Distributions of Carbon, Sulfur, Uranium, and Iron," Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, Vol. 13, No. 9, September 1976, p. 1161.

"What is the evidence for a primitive methane-ammonia atmosphere on earth? The answer is that there is no evidence for it, but much against it." Philip H. Abelson, "Chemical Events on the Primitive Earth," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 55, June 1966, p. 1365.

b. R. T. Brinkmann, "Dissociation of Water Vapor and Evolution of Oxygen in the Terrestrial Atmosphere," Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 74, No. 23, 20 October 1969, pp. 5355-5368.

c. "It is difficult to imagine how a little pond with just these components, and no others [no contaminants], could have formed on the primitive earth. Nor is it easy to see exactly how the precursors would have arisen." Francis Crick, Life Itself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), p. 85.

d. "But when multiple biopolymers must all converge at the same place at the same time to collectively interact in a controlled biochemical cooperative manner, faith in 'self-organization' becomes 'blind belief.' No empirical data or rational scientific basis exists for such a metaphysical leap." Abel and Trevors, p. 9.

e. "I believe this [the overwhelming tendency for chemical reactions to move in the direction opposite to that required for the evolution of life] to be the most stubborn problem that confronts us-the weakest link at present in our argument [for the origin of life]." George Wald, "The Origin of Life," p. 50.

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If, despite virtually impossible odds, proteins arose by chance processes, there is not the remotest reason to believe they could ever form a membrane-encased, self-reproducing, self-repairing, metabolizing, living cell (a).

a . "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. ... We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance." Dawkins, pp. 1, 43.

Yet, after such acknowledgments, Dawkins, an avowed atheist and perhaps the world's leading Darwinian, tries to show that life came about by chance without an intelligent designer. Dawkins fails to grasp the complexity in life.

"The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle." Denton, p. 264.

"Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which-a functional protein or gene-is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man? Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced artefacts appear clumsy. We feel humbled, as neolithic man would in the presence of twentieth-century technology. It would be an illusion to think that what we are aware of at present is any more than a fraction of the full extent of biological design. In practically every field of fundamental biological research ever-increasing levels of design and complexity are being revealed at an ever-accelerating rate." Ibid., p. 342.

"We have seen that self-replicating systems capable of Darwinian evolution appear too complex to have arisen suddenly from a prebiotic soup. This conclusion applies both to nucleic acid systems and to hypothetical protein-based genetic systems." Shapiro, p. 207.

"We do not understand how this gap in organization was closed, and this remains the most crucial unsolved problem concerning the origin of life." Ibid., p. 299.

"More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance." Klaus Dose, "The Origin of Life: More Questions Than Answers," Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1988, p. 348.

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DNA and RNA. Comparisons can be made between the genetic material of different organisms. The list of organisms that have had all their genes sequenced and entered in databases, such as "GenBank," is doubling each year. Computer comparisons of each gene with all other genes in the database show too many genes that are completely unrelated to any others {d}. Therefore, an evolutionary relationship between genes is highly unlikely. Furthermore, there is no trace at the molecular level for the traditional evolutionary series: simple sea life, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals {e}. Each category of organism appears to be almost equally isolated {f}.

{d}. Gregory J. Brewer, "The Imminent Death of Darwinism and the Rise of Intelligent Design," ICR Impact, No. 341, November 2001, pp. 1-4.

Field, pp. 748-753.

{e}. Denton, p. 285.

{f}. "The really significant finding that comes to light from comparing the proteins' amino acid sequences is that it is impossible to arrange them in any sort of evolutionary series." Ibid., p. 289.

"Thousands of different sequences, protein and nucleic acid, have now been compared in hundreds of different species but never has any sequence been found to be in any sense the lineal descendant or ancestor of any other sequence." Ibid., pp. 289-290.

"Each class at a molecular level is unique, isolated and unlinked by intermediates. Thus molecules, like fossils, have failed to provide the elusive intermediates so long sought by evolutionary biology." Ibid., p. 290.

"There is little doubt that if this molecular evidence had been available one century ago it would have been seized upon with devastating effect by the opponents of evolution theory like Agassiz and Owen, and the idea of organic evolution might never have been accepted." Ibid., pp. 290-291.

"In terms of their biochemistry, none of the species deemed 'intermediate', 'ancestral' or 'primitive' by generations of evolutionary biologists, and alluded to as evidence of sequence in nature, show any sign of their supposed intermediate status." Ibid., p. 293.

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The genetic information in the DNA of each human cell is roughly equivalent to a library of 4,000 books (a).

a. Carl Sagan showed, using straight-forward calculations, why one cell's worth of genetic information is the equivalent of 4,000 books of printed information. Each of Sagan's 4,000 books had 500 pages with 300 words per page. (See Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 25.)

Each book would have a volume of about 50 cubic inches. An adult human's body contains about 10^14 (10 to the 14th power) cells. Somewhat less than 1,000 cubic miles have been eroded from the Grand Canyon. Therefore, we can say that if every cell in one person's body were reduced to its 4,000 books, it would fill the Grand Canyon 78 times.

The Moon is 240,000 miles from Earth. If the DNA in a human cell were stretched out and connected, it would be more than 7 feet long. If all this DNA in one person's body were placed end-to-end, it would extend to the Moon 552,000 times.

The DNA in a human cell weighs 6.4 x 10^-12 (10 to the -12 power) grams. [See Monroe W. Strickberger, Genetics, 2nd edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1976), p. 54.] Probably less than 50 billion people have lived on earth. If so, one copy of the DNA of every human who ever lived-enough to define the physical characteristics of all those people in excruciating and microscopic detail-would weigh less than the weight of one aspirin.

"... there is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over....There is enough storage capacity in the DNA of a single lily seed or a single salamander sperm to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica 60 times over. Some species of the unjustly called 'primitive' amoebas have as much information in their DNA as 1,000 Encyclopaedia Britannicas." Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, pp. 116-117.

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To produce just the enzymes in one organism would require more than 10^40,000 trials (d). (To begin to large 10^40,000 is, realize that the visible universe has fewer than 10^80 atoms in it.)

Since 1970, evolutionists have referred to large segments of DNA as "junk DNA," because it supposedly had no purpose and was left over from our evolutionary past. We now know this "junk" explains much of the complexity of organisms. Use of the term "junk DNA" reflected past ignorance (e).

d. "The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10^20)2,000 = 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth [by chance or natural processes], this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court." Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, p. 24.

"Any theory with a probability of being correct that is larger than one part in 10^40,000 must be judged superior to random shuffling [of evolution]. The theory that life was assembled by an intelligence has, we believe, a probability vastly higher than one part in 10^40,000 of being the correct explanation of the many curious facts discussed in preceding chapters. Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific." Ibid., p. 130.

After explaining the above to a scientific symposium, Hoyle said that evolution was comparable with the chance that "a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein." Fred Hoyle, "Hoyle on Evolution," Nature, Vol. 294, 12 November 1981, p. 105.

e. "The failure to recognize the importance of introns [so-called junk DNA] may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology." John S. Mattick, as quoted by W. Wayt Gibbs, "The Unseen Genome: Gems among the Junk," Scientific American, Vol. 289, November 2003, pp. 49-50.

"What was damned as junk because it was not understood may, in fact, turn out to be the very basis of human complexity." Ibid., p. 52.

"Noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) [so-called junk RNA] have been found to have roles in a great variety of processes, including transcription regulation, chromosome replication, RNA processing and modification, messenger RNA stability and translation, and even protein degradation and translocation. Recent studies indicate that ncRNAs are far more abundant and important than initially imagined." Gisela Storz, "An Expanding Universe of Noncoding RNAs," Science, Vol. 296, 17 May 2002, p. 1260.

"The term 'junk DNA' is a reflection of our ignorance." Gretchen Vogel, "Why Sequence the Junk?" Science, Vol. 291, 16 February 2001, p. 1184.

"...non-gene sequences [what evolutionists called 'junk DNA'] have regulatory roles." John M. Greally, "Encyclopaedia of Humble DNA," Nature, Vol. 447, 14 June 2007, p. 782.

http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/LifeSciences38.html#wp1009517

Writer George V. Caylor interviewed Sam, a molecular biologist. George asked Sam about his work. Sam said he and his team were scientific "detectives," working with DNA and tracking down the cause of disease. Here is their published conversation.

G: "Sounds like pretty complicated work."
S: "You can't imagine how complicated!"
G: "Try me."
S: "I'm a bit like an editor, trying to find a spelling mistake inside a document larger than four complete sets of Encyclopedia Britannica. Seventy volumes, thousands and thousands of pages of small print words."
G: "With the computer power, you can just use 'spell check'!"
S: "There is no 'spell check' because we don't know yet how the words are supposed to be spelled. We don't even know for sure which language. And it's not just the 'spelling error' we're looking for. If any of the punctuation is out of place, or a space out of place, or a grammatical error, we have a mutation that will cause a disease."
G: "So how do you do it?"
S: "We are learning as we go. We have already 'read' over two articles in that encyclopedia, and located some 'typo's'. It should get easier as time goes by."
G: "How did all that information happen to get there?"
S: "Do you mean, did it just happen? Did it evolve?"
G: "Bingo. Do you believe that the information evolved?"
S: "George, nobody I know in my profession truly believes it evolved. It was engineered by 'genius beyond genius,' and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book. Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise. A bit like Neil Armstrong believing the moon is made of green cheese. He's been there!"
G: "Have you ever stated that in a public lecture, or in any public writings?"
S: "No. It all just evolved."
G: "What? You just told me - ?"
S: "Just stop right there. To be a molecular biologist requires one to hold on to two insanities at all times. One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself. Two, it would be insane to say you don't believe in evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures-everything would stop. I'd be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where I couldn't earn a decent living."
G: "I hate to say it, Sam, but that sounds intellectually dishonest."
S: "The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind's worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the 'elephant in the living room'."
G: "What elephant?"
S: "Design. It's like the elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up an enormous amount of space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn't there!"

George V. Caylor, "The Biologist," The Ledger, Vol. 2, Issue 48, No. 92, 1 December 2000, p. 2. (www.ontherightside.com) Printed with permission.

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Genetic material, DNA and RNA, is composed of nucleotides. In living things, nucleotides are always "right-handed." (They are called right-handed, because a beam of polarized light passing through them rotates like a right-handed screw.) Nucleotides rarely form outside life, but when they do, half are left-handed, and half are right-handed. If the first nucleotides formed by natural processes, they would have "mixed-handedness" and therefore could not evolve life's genetic material. In fact, "mixed" genetic material cannot even copy itself (a).

Each type of amino acid, when found in nonliving material or when synthesized in the laboratory, comes in two chemically equivalent forms. Half are right-handed, and half are left-handed-mirror images of each other. However, amino acids in life, including plants, animals, bacteria, molds, and even viruses, are essentially all left-handed (b) -except in some diseased or aging tissue (c). No known natural process can isolate either the left-handed or right-handed variety. The mathematical probability that chance processes could produce merely one tiny protein molecule with only left-handed amino acids is virtually zero (d).

A similar observation can be made for a special class of organic compounds called sugars. In living systems, sugars are all right-handed. Based on our present understanding, natural processes produce equal proportions of left-handed and right-handed sugars. Because sugars in living things are right-handed, random natural processes apparently did not produce life.

If any living thing took in (or ate) amino acids or sugars with the wrong handedness, the organism's body could not process it. Such food would be useless, if not harmful. Because evolution favors slight variations that enhance survivability and reproduction, consider how advantageous a mutation might be that switched (or inverted) a plant's handedness. "Inverted" (or wrong-handed) trees would proliferate rapidly, because they would no longer provide nourishment to bacteria, mold, or termites. "Inverted" forests would fill the continents. Other "inverted" plants and animals would also benefit and would overwhelm the balance of nature. Why do we not see such species with right-handed amino acids and left-handed sugars? Similarly, why are there not more poisonous plants? Why don't beneficial mutations let most carriers defeat their predators? Beneficial mutations are rarer than most evolutionists believe.

(a). "Equally disappointing, we can induce copying of the original template only when we run our experiments with nucleotides having a right-handed configuration. All nucleotides synthesized biologically today are righthanded. Yet on the primitive earth, equal numbers of right- and left-handed nucleotides would have been present. When we put equal numbers of both kinds of nucleotides in our reaction mixtures, copying was inhibited." Leslie E. Orgel, "The Origin of Life on the Earth," Scientific American, Vol. 271, October 1994, p. 82.

"There is no explanation why cells use L [left-handed] amino acids to synthesize their proteins but D [right-handed] ribose or D-deoxyribose to synthesize their nucleotides or nucleic acids. In particular, the incorporation of even a single L-ribose or L-deoxyribose residue into a nucleic acid, if it should ever occur in the course of cellular syntheses, could seriously interfere with vital structure-function relationships. The well-known double helical DNA structure does not allow the presence of L-deoxyribose; the replication and transcription mechanisms generally require that any wrong sugar such as L-deoxyribose has to be eliminated, that is, the optical purity of the D-sugars units has to be 100%." Dose, p. 352.

(b). An important exception occurs in a component in cell membranes of eubacteria. There the amino acids are right-handed. This has led many to conclude that they must have evolved separately from all other bacteria. Because evolving the first living cell is so improbable, having it happen twice, in effect, compounds the improbability. [See Adrian Barnett, "The Second Coming: Did Life Evolve on Earth More Than Once?" New Scientist, Vol. 157, No. 2121, 14 February 1998, p. 19.]

(c). Recent discoveries have found that some amino acids, most notably aspartic acid, flip (at certain locations in certain proteins) from the normal left-handed form to the right-handed form. Flipping increases with age and correlates with disease, such as Alzheimer's disease, cataracts, and arteriosclerosis. As one ages, flipping even accumulates in facial skin, but not other skin. [See Noriko Fujii, "D-Amino Acid in Elderly Tissues," Biological and Pharmaceutical Bulletin, Vol. 28, September 2005, pp. 1585-1589.]

If life evolved, why did this destructive tendency to flip not destroy cells long before complete organisms evolved?