Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
A few weekends ago, I was holidaying with a classic car club, which is one of my interests, and we had a trivia night competition between a couple of the car clubs. And one of the questions was, what ancient art form is associated with DNA? And the answer was origami. And as we found out, and it was all to do with the folding and it was to do with the interesting fact, of course, that DNA has to be folded.
And I thought, well, this is interesting. That was a question just in a trivia night question that had a bit of science to it because the questions were thought up by the different members of the two clubs and it was car clubs and it was part of a competition. And then just immediately after getting back from the car club, I had to fly interstate and had meetings at a couple of leading universities, leading Australian Universities.
In one, I had to present some certificates for research awards for postgraduate students in the area of agriculture and food research. And it was interesting, though, I was talking to some of the students and talking to some of the professors. Remember, I was talking about answers to prayer.
And one of the comments from one of the professors was, well, that was lucky. Those guys have had luck. They've been lucky.
I was referring to a book that I edited, or referring to stories in a book that I'd edited called, “On The Seventh Day” 40 Scientists and Academics Explain Why They Believe in God”. And that book, of course, is still available in bookshops and on Amazon and so forth. And for that book, I'd actually written to a number of scientists, all who had been educated at state type universities and who also taught at state type universities.
So they hadn't been educated in religious based or church based universities. And it's interesting, these scientists and academics give their reasons why they choose to believe in God, and many of them involve personal answers to prayer and God's leading in their lives, and also the overwhelming evidence for a creator and particularly for intelligent design in nature.
And again, as I looked at so much of the research we're doing in the area of agriculture and one of the hot topics that was associated in the panel discussion that I was involved with had to do with climate change and changing climates and how that affects the economics of agriculture and also some of the aspects of the scientific research that's being done that's involved in this area.
And it's interesting how the academia is so heavily steeped in this theory of evolution and long ages, and yet the evidence for intelligent design is overwhelming for example, if we look at the earth and our environment, and as I said, this research conference where the students from the university were presenting their research findings to date, was a lot of focus on the systems of the earth and ecology, this sort of thing. And yet there was a book that was written 120 years ago, back in the early 19 hundreds, by Dr. Henderson, Professor Henderson, on the fitness of the environment.
It's amazing how, and he recognised the evidence that we have that our environment is just so tuned for life. And just take the common example that is around us all the time of water. Freezing water, when it freezes, just before it gets to freezing point, at about four degrees celsius, begins to expand due to the structure of the chemical bonding in water.
And as a result, the colder water floats on the surface and then it freezes over. And so this then preserves the marine life that would be in the pond or lake and helps preserve the life. And it's an amazing and a unique feature of water that suddenly, even though the temperature is cooling and the water is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, but then it begins to expand so that it floats.
And this evidence for design is just everywhere that so many aspects of nature are designed just to work.
There was a book published in the late 1980s called, “The Anthropic Cosmological Principle”. It's published by Oxford University Press. And the authors were J Barrow and F Tipler. And essentially these scientists again identified that the Earth and the solar system that were in, had certain features that were just tailor made to support life. And they had identified more than 250 optimised design requirements that a planet must have for carbon based life.
And it included, for example, a robust but customised atmosphere with appropriate quantities of water that could be in the various phases, both ice, liquid and vapour, and an ideal range of surface temperatures and a period on its rotation that was finely tuned. And that was one of the things that these authors pointed out, that so much as it's just finely tuned, the Earth in our system has all the hallmarks of incredible intelligent design. Like, even when we look at the sunlight from the light from the sun, the light that a star emits depends on its mass.
Now, in the case of the sun, the light that it produces is just in the right range for photosynthesis. If it was shifted a little bit more to the red or a little bit more to the blue, the photosynthetic reaction, which is essential for plants producing carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and oxygen, just wouldn't work. And again, they wouldn't be producing the light giving oxygen anywhere near as efficiently as they do.
Another factor is if the sun was more massive, the radiation from the sun would overwhelm the defensive effects of the Earth's magnetosphere. Magnetosphere the effects, the magnetic fields produced by the Earth's magnet that we have, this magnet, a giant magnet that we have in the Earth with the north and south pole, the magnetic field that is produced. And so, again, this radiation, again, would be harmful, alive or depending, or could even strip away the atmosphere.
On the other hand, too, if it was a much smaller star, stars of very low mass tend to be unstable and can often emit flares that, again, would strip the flares of particles and energy that would, again, strip the atmosphere of any planets that were close enough to be habitable. And so our sun is actually, for its size also is actually amazingly stable. And again, if you have a star like our sun, there's only a limited range of distances from it from which an orbiting planet could potentially be habitable.
If the sun was less massive, if it was much smaller, then the range of habitable distances would be even smaller. And again, any planet with that close would also suffer, probably from tidal lofting. That is where the force of gravity between it and the sun is very strong, meaning that one side of it would be locked into continually facing the sun.
That would give you really extreme temperatures on one side, too hot for life, probably, and then too cold for most life on the other side. And so it's interesting that these scientists, and there was another book that was published in the early 2,000s, that's right, 2004, by G. Gonzalez and J. Richards, that was called, “The Privileged Planet”. And they argue again that the earth's distance from the sun seems to be so precisely balanced that it allows for this really stable water cycle.
And it's fascinating, too, that even just the atmosphere around our planet is just at the right density, that it allows water vapour to condense and then float as the clouds. When I was flying back home the other day, looking out over the clouds, I was thinking about this and how the density of the air is just right to allow birds to fly, for us to make planes that can fly. And it creates winds.
There are winds there, and while we can get strong winds and we can have these very damaging hurricanes, we do survive them.
And again, there's just so much that the nature of our atmosphere, the composition of it, the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen and so forth, allows fire to burn, but without it burning really too fast and not too slow either, it just seems to be just the right level there. I can remember when I was a cadet scientist I had the job of commissioning a gas analyzer.
The company that I was working for, BHP, now the world's largest mining company, but back then they were one of the largest. Well, the largest steel maker in the southern hemisphere.
And they were looking at developing fuel cells that ran directly on natural gas. And we were doing experiments looking at measuring the composition of natural gas from a number of resources that BHP held. And we just received a new gas analyzer and my job was to commission it.
And one of the gases that we analysed for that is in the natural gas reserves that we had was hydrogen. And of course I said I knew the molecular stoichiometry of hydrogen, of hydrogen and oxygen. And so I thought, right, well if we have equal molar amounts of hydrogen oxygen, no worries, we'll get a complete reaction.
I hadn't bothered to read the instructions that said make sure there's no more than 5% oxygen, otherwise you will get an explosion. Well of course I had 50% oxygen and the result was a very large explosion. Fortunately no one was hurt, and fortunately the equipment was designed for the explosive gases to be released without demolishing the equipment. But again, it made me realise as I was thinking about this time that so many things are just finely tuned. And if we don't get them just perfectly right, they don't work.
Things don't work properly. And I think this is something that many scientists don't appreciate in terms of the fine tuning. Unless so many things in our atmosphere and environment are fine tuned, life would not exist.
And for these to all occur by coincidence, like some people try to argue with answers to prayer where you were just lucky, it was just a coincidence. I think when we look at the overall effects that are happening, I think that the evidence for the intervention of a supernatural all powerful God is overwhelming. And just recently I was reading about another factor too.
And that is the folding of DNA that I referred to. Easier. Now when we look at DNA, and of course, the DNA, as we know, is deoxyribonucleic acid.
And this is a giant molecule that is made up of a number of compounds. But it contains some coding compounds or their coding chemical types called adenine, thiamine, cytosine and guanine, ATC and G. They're abbreviated.
And these are four chemical structures that actually constitute a chemical language. And on the basis of this chemical language using a ribosome, a ribosome can take those letters and from those letters, use that code to assemble proteins and make the structures of the cell so that it can reproduce. It's an amazing system.
It's an information storing mechanism involving a chemical molecule. And so, for example, in your human DNA, there's about 3 billion of these particular chemical letters, so to speak. And our cells, of course, contain two complete copies, one we inherited from our mum and one from our dad.
And it's interesting that if you stretched out DNA, the DNA in a single cell, as a long strand, it would be about two metres long, and yet the DNA can actually fit in the cell. Now, the reason is it folds, it folds up. And one of the fascinating features about it folding, it's being really explored just recently as we've developed a lot of computer modelling.
And so, as I was saying, all living things have, we have these proteins in our cells that are made up of amino acids in a particular sequence, and this sequence is specified by the DNA instructions for making this, and then this chain is then folded to enable it to perform a particular function. And so not only is the DNA itself folded up, but many of these amino acids themselves have to be folded in a particular way for their chemistry to work.
And for example, a number of, there are complex biomolecular machines that actually transport the substances within our cells, called kinesins, and these are made up of chains that are folded into a three dimensional structure that gives it its unique structure and function. And so a kinesin cell can actually transport little bags of proteins along particular filaments that actually carry these particular parts to where these particular protein parts for assembly to where they're needed in the cell.
Now, one of the challenges for scientists to have been working on for decades is trying to actually work out how these shapes conform and how they're folded. And it's amazing that the cells fold these proteins in a particular way. In 2020, the Google's DeepMind programme called Alpha Fold, used artificial intelligence trained on extensive protein structure database to actually solve protein structures.
And if you want to read about this, you can look up about the Google's DeepMind programme. There was an article published on nature.com on the 30 November 2020 by E Callaway, Callaway, and the title of the article is called, ‘It Will Change Everything: DeepMind’s Artificial Intelligence Makes Gigantic Leap in Solving Protein Structures. Google's deep learning programme for determining the 3D shapes of proteins stands to transform biology, say scientists.
Another article that was published in nature.com on the 17 February 2021 in the NPJ, Quantum Information by A. Roberts and three others was called, “Resource-Efficient Quantum Algorithm for Protein Folding”. So the journal is called NPJ Quantum Information.
And then another article that's been published on this that those listeners may be interested in looking up, was published on the site to medium.com on the 20 August 2021 by R. Letzter. And it was called, “A Novel Quantum Algorithm for Protein-folding: Paving the Way Towards Resolving One of the Biggest Mysteries in Biology with Quantum Computers”. And so I think this gives you a bit of an idea of the fascinating problem of trying to understand how these amazing folding systems could originate by chance.
The IBM research scientist and one of the authors of the second paper I mentioned explains that folding is an exponential problem. It's huge. As each additional bond occurs in the chain becomes.
In other words, as the chain of the protein becomes longer, it becomes more and more difficult to fold and soon it would become almost impossibly complex. And it's interesting, back in 1969, a molecular biologist by the name of Cyrus Levinthal estimated that if cells took every try possible approach, they would take longer than billions of years, claimed by evolutionary age of the universe, to complete one fold. And this is actually known as Levinthal's paradox.
I'll spell that name for you because I'm not very good at pronouncing it. It's L-E-V-I-N-T-H-A-L apostrophe S paradox. So again, you can look that up.
And again, this is just one of the other aspects that we have that points to creation, supernatural creation for living systems. We're talking about these proteins that are involved, encoded for in the DNA and the folding of DNA itself, to work out a fold, particularly on these long molecules that are going to work, that works, that enables the molecule still to be active, to carry out particular specific chemical function with the combinations available on these long molecules is just enormous and yet everything works. And there are so many of these molecules that have all lined up, they've all folded just right, they all work, they work in these really complex systems.
And it's interesting that trying to work this out, they have used both artificial intelligence and quantum computers. It's interesting in 2021, the IBM's quantum computer, that a computer at the cutting edge of this new technology managed to simulate the folding of a protein. It used 22 quantum bits, or qubits.
These are analogous to a bit in ordinary computing. Adding a qubit doubles the processing power. So 22 of them are 4 billion times faster than a single qubit.
So it's amazing computing programmes that used now it's interesting, the programme statistically sampled combinations to see which would result in the lowest energy state, as this would reflect the real world, where molecules move to lower energy states the most stable. And this feat involved, they only used a protein that only had ten amino acids, called angiotensin, which constricts blood vessels and elevates blood pressure. And it's amazing that had to use this very complex computer to work out, and that's such a simple protein with just ten amino acids.
When we think of the design, for example, of the kinesins that have these special structures and so forth, that are involved and affect the programming of how these particular codes work, enabling them to perform their tasks, is amazingly complex. And if protein folding doesn't occur, life can't exist. But it's interesting, the DNA and other machinery that is guiding this folding needs already folded proteins in order to exist and operate.
And so here we have the classic chicken and egg conundrum for evolution. It's quite clear that any living thing must have been able to perform this incredible feat of being able to fold these proteins just the right way to achieve the lowest energy levels right from the moment they were created. So again, when we look at the big picture of the structure of our planet, everything is designed, when we look, go down to the molecular structures in living systems, just to the way the molecules that make up living systems have folded, we can say there's overwhelming evidence of design, but more than that, these complex systems had to have this immediately, as soon as they were made alive.
No time for evolution whatsoever. Absolutely no time. So we have powerful evidence for a super intelligent creator God.
Remember, if you want to cheque these references out and follow up on these topics, just Google 3abnaustralia.org.au That's all, one word and click on the listen button or the radio button and go to the programme Faith and Science. And remember too to tell your friends and put links up to these programmes on social media so that other people can come aware of the growing evidence that we have for intelligent design and creation.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
