Episode Transcript
Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
I know often when you look at the different discussions on the ever for creation versus evolution, sometimes a number of articles are published by chemists and people. Some of the detractors try to say, well, they're not biologists, they're not really qualified to talk in the area of evolution, but evolution, the claimed evolution is underpinned by biochemistry, or biochemistry by chemical reactions themselves. And in actual fact, chemists have very good insight into, particularly organic chemists, into the requirements that would be necessary for evolution to occur by chance in nature.
And the evidence is just overwhelming everywhere we look in nature, at the chemical reactions, it all points to a super intelligent creator designer. The evidence is overwhelming everywhere. And it just really frustrates me that this isn't being pointed out to students and some of the claims that are being made to try and explain evolution under certain environmental conditions.
Fish somehow developed the different structures to become an amphibian and so forth, and the claims for these sort of changes in the fossil record. But what the people making these assertions seem to not understand is the massive amount of biochemistry changes that are required, and these involve reactions and specific compounds that are required to change physical structures and make new physical structures work and so forth, let alone the programming required changes required in the DNA itself to encode for all this new information blindly by random chance. And I'd like to illustrate this, an article that I read recently by a synthetic chemist, Dr.
Glenn Phillips. Dr. Phillips earned his PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from Michigan State University, and he's written a couple of books on organic chemistry.
And he actually served as a professor of chemistry at the University of South Alabama. And he gives an illustration in this book that I've referred to a few times, Design and Catastrophe: 51 Scientists Explore Evidence in Nature, which was published by Andrews University Press in 2021.
And he has a chapter in there on Cholesterol: The Wonder of Biosynthesis. Now, probably most of us have heard of cholesterol.
In many western countries, people have medical cheques and their cholesterol levels are measured and we're told to get our cholesterol level down to a certain level if it's high, in order to reduce the risk of heart disease and so forth, heart and artery disease. But cholesterol is a very important material in mammals. Very, very important material.
And it was discovered nearly 250 years ago, back in 1769, Francis Palettia de la Salle isolated it from gallstones. And since that time, it's actually attracted a lot of attention. Way back in 1932, the first total synthesis was attempted by chemists.
Now, by the 1930s, of course, we had a lot of chemistry. We were building high energy explosives, and there was a massive expansion of organic chemistry was occurring, and our understanding and synthetic chemistry was occurring in the 1930s. And so by 1949, after the war, and of course, massive advances in chemistry made during that time as well.
During the war period, two very famous groups were competing to be the first to synthesise cholesterol. So here we have this compound that is found in our bodies, in nature, and here we have teams of scientists competing to try and figure out how to make it. Now, again, if we look at the evolutionary scenario, this occurred in nature all by blind random chance.
And I think this article, as Dr. Phillips points out, really explains beautifully how far removed blind random chance can be to produce cholesterol. And remember, the way it's got to be produced is you've got to have changes.
Random mutations in a code, in a DNA code made up of four chemicals that encode this information. Hope we abbreviate, act and g. So it was interesting, it wasn't until 1951 that the first synthetic route was published by Robinson and Cornforth.
And then the following year, another synthesis was published by Woodford and Sondheimer. Since then, at least three other synthetic roots have been reported, with the final product being either a racemic mixture, that's a 50 50 mixture of the natural product and its mirror image of the natural product. So there's all these attempts.
Now, one of the interesting things is that none of those attempts were able to produce the pure compound. They could produce a 50 50 mixture, but that was the best that they could, could do, or they could produce the mirror image, but they couldn't produce the pure compound. So here we have top scientists in the world working together to try and synthesise this important biochemical that's important in life, particularly for mammals, and they haven't been able to synthesise the pure compound.
And it's interesting, he says, each of the chemical roots to synthesis started with a naturally occurring compound that could be either extracted from natural sources or bought from a chemical company that synthesised the starting material from even simpler natural products. In order to synthesise cholesterol, they had to make a whole lot of different intermediates, they had to make various catalysts, they had to make whole lot of other support reagents and substrates. All these chemicals had to be purchased or prepared.
And the shortest reported route to the mirror image, cholesterol, not the naturally occurring compound, consisted of 16 steps. So there were 16 separate chemical reactions that had to be set up and the chemists had to do. And in the end they got.
When they started with the compound s citronellol, they ended up with a 2% yield. So only 2% of the theoretical yield that they should have got were they able to achieve the synthesis of pure naturally occurring synthesis took many more steps. So eventually they did achieve the synthesis of the pure material and the yield was minuscule.
And so they sort of worked on it for years to achieve that synthesis, eventually getting through to the pure material. Now if anyone is interested in looking up, the reference was Bicardwell, Cornforth, Holterman and Robinson. It was a paper titled Total Synthesis of androgenic hormones.
And it was published in Chemistry and Industry in 1951. Volume 101, pages three eightyn to 390. Another paper that might be a little bit easier for people to look up because it was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1952.
Volume 74, pages 4223 to 4251. And that's by Woodward and co authors. So we can see that it took quite a team to synthesise that, just to synthesise cholesterol.
Massive effort. Now in mammals, cholesterol synthesised mainly in the liver, but also in the adrenal glands and the intestines and also in the gonads. But it's entire carbon backbones made from one molecule, an acetyl group.
And the first stage of the biological synthesise synthesis utilises three of those acetyl groups and involves a coenzyme which is then used to produce mavalinate, which is a six carbon intermediate. And then the next step involves adding three phosphates to it and to the two hydroxyl groups using another special enzyme kinase and also adding three atp adenosine triphosphates to it. Now it's interesting that in the synthesis that occurs in mammals naturally in nature, the canase enzyme just adds a phosphate group and then later adds more phosphate groups and then removes some carbon dioxide.
So it's quite a tricky chemical reaction series goes on there. This produces a product, isopentyl pyrophosphate, and then some of that is stored in that form while a larger portion is converted to another chemical, dimethyl phallyl pyrophosphate. And this uses a separate isomerization process.
And in this process one of the external double bond bonds is moved to inside the ring. So the chemical synthesis goes on involving a whole lot of more steps that are involved in the synthesis of cholesterol. For example, another pharmacyl pyrophosphate is produced and added to one that was produced earlier in the synthesis.
And that makes squalene with 30 carbons. Now, squalene has all the carbons needed to make cholesterol. But the actual famous four ring structure that cholesterol has, hasn't been formed.
And so to achieve this, one of two double bonds at the end of the squalene chain, out of a possible six choices, is oxidised with oxygen and another chemical called nicotinamide dinucleotide phosphate. And it makes squalene oxide. Now, that particular oxide is then cleaved chemically in quite an impressive cascade reaction in which all the internal double bonds of squalene react in sequence to form the steroid ring system.
So it's amazing chemistry that has taken place. Now, Lano sterol is the next major intermediate. It's formed via a number of hydride and methyl group shifts and an elimination of hydrogen to produce the double bond.
And it takes another 19 steps. After all these steps in the body, it takes another 19 chemical reaction steps to produce cholesterol. These steps include the removal of three of the eight methyl groups present in the lana sterol by using demethylation plus the addition and removal of double bonds.
So this is an amazing series of complex chemical reactions that are extremely difficult to do in the laboratory net alone occur by chance in nature. And when you think about it, all these chemicals there and their chemical reactions are programmed in the dna to take place with the required enzymes and other systems, making the other chemicals that are involved in the reactions and this sort of thing, it's absolutely huge. And of course, cholesterol is very important because it is used to make vitamin D, sunlight.
The reaction of sunlight and cholesterol makes vitamin D. It's important in making important fatty acids that are important for our biochemistry in our body and other steroids. But, you know, it's quite fascinating, and this is one of the factors that points to a design feature we need to remember too, that cholesterol, because of its nature, has eight, what we call chiral centres, which means that based on its structure, there are a possible 256.
So that's two to the power eight compounds that could be synthesised with the same chemical formula, but a slightly different structure. Now, I'll just explain that again. So if we go back to a simpler explanation, perhaps if you take your left hand and hold it up to the mirror, what you see in the mirror is your right hand.
In other words, your right hand is the mirror image of your left hand. So you have four fingers and a thumb on both hands, but you can't put a right hand into a left handed glove. It just doesn't fit.
Even though it's still four fingers and one thumb, the arrangement is such that its three dimensional structure is slightly different. And it's the same with cholesterol. Cholesterol, because of its structure, can have 256 different mirror image forms.
And this is because there are eight carbon atoms that have these four different bonds that allow for the different mirror imager arrangements. So that means that, as I said, there's a possible 256 structures. But it's interesting.
Only one is produced in the body, and that's the one that is essential and works for the chemical reactions. So again, this is just powerful evidence against the claim that random mutations can produce the desired effect, because the structure that's required is one of 256 possible structures, and that's the one that is produced and that's the one that works. It's interesting when they synthesise the mirror image of cholesterol and this sort of thing, it doesn't have the same biochemical properties, it doesn't work the same.
And as I think I've mentioned before, when I've talked about this too often, say you have a left handed form is the one that the body is utilising, then often the right handed form is poisonous and vice versa. And so a number of venoms, animal venoms, are simply the opposite optical isomer of the natural compound that's required for metabolism in the body. But the toxin is the mirror image compound.
So when you think about the specificity, how specified this whole series of biochemical reactions is, and it's interesting that the chemistry in the body is designed. There's overwhelming evidence that's designed to determine how each isoprene unit should be stored and assembled, as well as how to differentiate between six double bonds in squalene and the eight methyl groups in the lanisterol. The enzyme selectivity that is used, the fact the specificity is astounding.
So, in other words, the enzymes that control these reactions are so specific, and remember, they have to be synthesised. Not only has cholesterol got to be synthesised, but these enzyme compounds have to be synthesised. And we have to have the code, the genetic code, the DNA code, to construct those proteins and make those enzymes.
And the claim that evolutionists have that these structures arose by blind chance. And we could see the interconnectivity of the chemistry of this. Unless you have the enzymes, those specific enzymes, cholesterol isn't going to form if then cholesterol doesn't form, then whole biochemical chains are going to fail, and the mammal isn't going to survive, and we wouldn't survive.
And so we can see this is just one aspect of amazing interconnected biochemistry. And it's not one or two steps we see. There are a huge number of steps are involved in the natural synthesis.
A huge number of steps. Once we got to lanosterol, it took another 19 chemical steps to make cholesterol. Cholesterol is.
We know where cholesterol is made. It's made in the liver, adrenal glands, intestines and agonads. And we know what it's made from.
It's from the manipulation of one molecule, an acetyl group. And it's made through a complex series of steps, extremely complex series of steps. But as the author of this article, Dr. Phillips, points out, two questions remain unanswered at this point. When was cholesterol first made and by whom? If the scientific community considered it appropriate to honour with Nobel prizes the first synthetic feats of Sir Robert Robinson, John Cornforth and Robert B. Woodward, a truly scientific mind must ask the same question about nature. Who created these synthetic pathways? And when you consider this, it's just one of an uncounted number of compounds necessary for life. And it's interesting, Dr. Phillips proposes that the real prize belongs to the author of Life and Nature. And of course, that's the creator God. The creator God that we, you know, I just consider the world news around at the moment, and as people are arguing and debating over different things, and we can see there's all this relativism is just being propagated.
What's true for me, this is true for me, and so forth. This whole idea that there's no absolute truth, the absolute truth of a creator designer is just everywhere in nature. When we consider the biochemical steps required in just compounds like cholesterol that we take for granted, we go to the doctor and we get our cholesterol level measured and so forth, we just forget the amount of specific designed biochemistry that underpins.
And as you know, the author, Dr. Phillips, pointed just the number of different specific biochemical reactions that are required to maintain living systems, whether it be plants, algae, bacteria, mammals, insects, fish, creepy crawlies, all these things. They're full of specific compounds that chemical compounds that are required for life, let alone the complex reproductive systems and so forth, we see the evidence for a supernatural creator is there.
And if that creator can create these amazing systems, including our brain, and as I've said, before our thoughts are non material, that non material creator, which is outside space and time, because he created the universe, he created matter, he spoke, the Bible talks about, he spoke reality into existence. He can communicate with our minds and he has. The Bible says that that creator wants to have a relationship with us and had spoken to people in the past, audibly spoke to people, sent angels that talked to people, beings that, again, were able to travel without the limitations of space and time as we know it, to people.
And the accounts of these are enormous. And studies have been done. There's a group at Oxford years ago that were know made a study of reactions, of encounters, rather spiritual encounters of people, of answers to prayer, of seeing angels and this sort of thing.
The evidence is overwhelming there, and the evidence is overwhelming that God came as Jesus Christ and lived among us to show the creator. God manifested himself as a human, to live among us and to teach us. And some people think, well, why there and why at that particular time? But as I've read the Bible and looked at history, it just so much makes sense.
And the way God did, it makes sense because it leaves everything up to our choice. Do we want to choose to be in God's kingdom? Do we want to choose to be in a kingdom that has the principles that Jesus taught? That's the bottom line, really. And if we do, God offers that if we choose to believe that Jesus was God and that God raised him from the dead, and that we choose him as Lord and our saviour and choose to obey his commandments, which are essentially to love one another, we will be saved, because this world is going to end.
God's going to bring an end to it. The Bible says that clearly there's going to be a judgement. So we have that wonderful hope that the Bible gives us.
And that message, of course, is in the Bible. And I encourage everyone listening to buy a Bible, to get a Bible and to read. If you have one and haven't read it for a while, start reading it.
Particularly the New Testament and particularly perhaps the Book of John. In the New Testament, you've been listening to faith and science. And remember, if you want to relisten this programme, just Google 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the listen button.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
