Some notes on the origin of life and the Shroud of Turin

A little article of mine went up this morning in Meridian Magazine: “When “Great” Men Are Anything But: Rethinking Power Through the Lens of Christ”

Statues may rise for those called “great,” but history often forgets the blood they shed to get there. The world crowns the conqueror, but heaven sees greatness another way.

I have never had strong feelings or a firm opinion about the famous Shroud of Turin and, although I find it interesting, I haven’t spent a lot of time on it or read systematically about it.  Here, though, is a brief recent article on the topic that I think some might find worth a quick read:  “A Quick Bible Study Vol. 271: Shroud of Turin Expert Russ Breault Interview”

I’m occasionally described as anti-evolution and, even, as a young-earth creationist.  I’m certainly not the latter, and I can’t remember a time when I ever was.  Since my childhood, since long before I became a committed Latter-day Saint, I’ve had a perhaps unusually strong interest in dinosaurs and the like.  Seeing estimates for the Mesozoic Era, the so-called “Age of the Dinosaurs,” that place it between about 252 million years ago and sixty-six million years ago has never caused me to bat an eye.  Occasionally, I’m confronted with demands that I fess up about how old I really believe the Earth to be.  My answer is that, at least according to current scientific estimates, it’s about 4.543 billion years old, and that I have no reason whatever to dispute that.

I’m also not even remotely anti-evolution.  I haven’t published very much on the subject, but I think that the evidence for the historical development of terrestrial life is overwhelming.  And I hope that what little I have written about evolution (e.g., “How Can We Make Sense of Evolution?: A Latter-day Saint Perspective”) and my eagerness to solicit and to conduct such interviews as these will make the job of fundamentally misrepresenting my opinions on the matter at least somewhat more challenging to honest observers.  (I have absolutely no such hope for the small anonymous handful of my more determined and unscrupulous critics.)

With the preceding explanation in mind, I do think that some critics of Darwinian, or Neo-Darwinian, or unguided evolution — whatever term you prefer to use — and advocates of what is often called “intelligent design” have raised more than a few points that deserve thoughtful consideration rather than mere summary dismissal.

Below, I share with you a trio of quotations from Matti Leisola and Jonathan Witt, Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2018).  Matti Leisola, DSc, is a bioengineer and former dean of Chemistry and Material Sciences at Helsinki University of Technology.  He is an expert in enzymes and rare sugars, having published 140 peer-reviewed articles and won the Latsis Prize from the ETH-Zürich (the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology).  He served for a time as the research director of Cultor, an international biotech company, co-founded the International Society of Rare Sugars, and was the initiating editor of BIO-Complexity.:

I am not, and I don’t pretend to be, a biologist.  But this passage, which Leisola and Witt cite from the last chapter of a work called Enzymes, struck me.  It’s about attempts to explain the origins of, well, enzymes:

The difficulties appear to have been greatly underestimated . . . difficulties seem to have been increased rather than diminished recently.  Unfortunately, progress has not been helped by a strong tendency to make light of those difficulties, or even to ignore them altogether. . . .  The problem in fact seems as far from solution as it ever was. . . .  We are thus led to an apparently insoluble dilemma. . . .  The subject is full of difficulties.  (25)

Leisola and Witt go on to write that

The story of the unguided, chemical evolution of the first life has some variations depending on whose version you hear, but its main contours can be summarized as follows:

• At the time when the chemical constituents of the first life were developing, the Earth had virtually no free oxygen, important since the presence of free oxygen would prevent the formation of compounds essential for the origin of life.
• Nature invented a way to produce the chemical “letters” of the DNA/RNA alphabet: cytosine, adenine, thymine/uracil, and guanine (C, A, T/U, and G for short).
• Nature invented a way to make the sugars ribose and deoxyribose.
• Nature invented a way to combine these sugars, phosphoric acid, and the DNA/RNA alphabet letters (the four nucleobases — C, A, T/U, and G) into long chains.
• Nature invented a self-replicating molecule — DNA or RNA, and eventually both.
• Nature invented a method to make twenty distinct amino acids.  This is a higher-level alphabet consisting of twenty characters.
• Nature invented a way to combine these amino acids into sophisticated protein machines.
• After inventing all this, nature changed the self-replicating molecule into a system in which DNA coded for amino acids and thus for proteins.
• Finally, nature invented a membrane system that isolated the invented molecules from the environment and metabolism began. (26-27)

As I say, I am not a biologist.  So, if there are errors in the summary quoted immediately above, I would appreciate being cautioned against them, with specifics.

Leisola and Witt comment as follows upon the list that they’ve just offered:

As for the point about the early atmosphere containing no free oxygen, later findings have cast doubt on this, and an atmosphere with oxygen spells double trouble for nature’s efforts to generate the building blocks of life.  But even setting aside that major problem, the invention stages of the story face major obstacles.  All the inventions in the bullet points above somehow occurred in the face of one of nature’s basic laws, according to which natural systems, when left alone, tend towards disorder and, in the case of chemical reactions, towards equilibrium,  Nature, as it turns out, even has trouble getting there with the help of modern technology, brilliant laboratory scientists, and meticulous chemical engineering. (27)

There follows, in their discussion, a section on the chemical-evolution experiments of Stanley Miller, which — at least back when I was in high school — were taught as having settled a great deal more about the origins of organic terrestrial life than they actually had.