Author Tim Barnett
Published on 06/17/2019
Science

Evidence for Intelligent Design in Proteins

Tim describes the chirality problem as evidence against creation by chance.


Transcript

Now here’s what we’re gonna do: We are going to build a protein. Now, as a little helpful educational aid here, we have this toy, and this is gonna be our protein we want to build. But, I couldn’t fit 150 of these things in my luggage, so I only have whatever this is, like ten, okay? Each one of these is gonna be our amino acids, okay? And then we have, and then when we put them together, we make our our protein, okay? So we want to build a protein. There’s a problem though, right off the bat, if you want to build a protein, by chance, without any kind of intelligence. Here’s the problem. We can make amino acids, even in the laboratory, okay? The problem is when we make these things, they come in two different forms. They come in both left-handed and right handed amino acids. How many people in here are left-handed? Okay, this is like a shout out for you guys because it turns out, all my lefties, it turns out all of life is made up of left-handed amino acids. In fact, if you add one right-handed amino acid to the mix, you basically destroy your protein, okay? It won’t fold properly. And so what you want is only left-handed amino acids. That’s important. So it turns out, hey, if we want to build one of these by chance, what we’re gonna do is first we’re going to get our first left-hand amino acid, and then we’re gonna try and get another left-hand amino acid, stick it on there, and then another and another and until you’ve got 150 in a row. Now here’s the problem: When we make these in the laboratory or find them, they come in a 50/50 mixture. It’s basically a coin flip. So quite literally, if you want the odds probability of getting your left-handed amino acid, every time is a coin flip—one in two chance. And then when you start, you just like our bike lock, you start to multiply the difficulty, right? Because it’s you have 1 over 2 times 1 over 2 times 1, and all of a sudden if you have a hundred and fifty of these in a row. Well, your odds are now one in two to the power of 150. It would be like flipping a coin, getting heads a hundred and fifty times in a row. And if you get tails on the fourth try or the tenth try or the twentieth try or the hundred and forty ninth try, you got to start all over again. So it turns out when you change this into kind of base ten to make it a little easier here to understand, it’s a one in ten to the forty five chance to get our protein with just a left-hand amino acids. That’s a one followed by 45 zeros. But the problem gets worse, okay? That’s called the chirality problem which just means handedness. That’s the handedness problem. You need left-handed.