Saturday, March 15, 2008

This would still bother Einstein

Albert Einstein did not like it, it bothered him. The co-discoverer of the double helix Francis Crick was so astounded by the sheer chemical impossibility of it that he bought into panspermia to get around it. It can be argued that Dawkin's fundamental blind spot in the physical sciences is chemistry and biochemistry so he ignored it (or bought other peoples pat answers).

There is an unbreakable law in chemistry. It is one of the fundamental symmetry laws of Creation. It occurs at a microscopic level so deep that you have to go beyond understanding molecules to understanding the shape of molecules. It may not seem important but stick with me on this.

There are molecules in this Universe that have symmetry points in them. The ones that are easiest to see are molecules that have a carbon with four different things attached to them. Carbon atoms that have four attachments have a fixed tetrahedral geometry and if the smallest attachment is pointed directly up the other three rotate clockwise or counterclockwise about the carbon - smallest attachment axis. We call these options left or right handed and we know they are there because such molecules can rotate polarized light (how? we have no idea but we're working on it).


You body is mostly water but the parts that are not water are mostly proteins. You could think of proteins as long chains where each link in the chain is an amino acid (you know ... essential amino acids that show up in everything from food to shampoo). At the heart of all the amino acids except one there is one of those special carbon atoms and it can be left handed or right handed.




But here's the mystery, they are all left handed.




In fact, you can determine how old a protein is by the number of amino acids in it that have been changed to righthanded due to cosmic radiation (a process that happens at a known rate).

So what is the problem. We need to go back to that symmetry law. It is written in Creation that whenever a left handed carbon is created from non-handed materials there has to be a net symmetry conservation by the balancing creation of a right handed mirror image. Always. There will always be a 50:50 mixture of both.

The possibility that life started with a set of simple proteins still requires literally millions of these amino acids to somehow separate and associate perfectly with the exclusion of all the right handed molecules. The probability approaches the impossible. That is where Einstein, Crick and Dawkins get in the game.
Well, this problem has been in the news recently and they discovered that the amino acids that formed in a meteorite has the same symmetry breaking distribution of amino acids. So it is possible that the origin of the mystery does not have a terrestrial origin. They somehow think that this helps answer the problem as opposed to just deferring it. Blindness is blindness.