This is the online edition of In the Beginning:
Compelling
Evidence for Creation and the Flood (7th Edition)
by Dr. Walt Brown.
Copyright
Center
for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click
here to order the hardbound edition.
Genetic material, DNA and RNA, is composed of nucleotides. in living things, nucleotides are alwaysright-handed. (They were initially named right-handed because a beam of polarized light passing through them rotated like a right-handed screw.) Nucleotides rarely form outside life, but when they do, half are left-handed, and half are right-handed. If the first nucleotides formed by natural processes, they would havemixed-handedness and therefore could not evolve lifes genetic material. In fact,mixed genetic material cannot even copy itself.a
Each type of amino acid, when found in nonliving material or when synthesized in the laboratory, comes in two chemically equivalent forms. Half are right-handed, and half are left-handed=97mirror images of each other. However, amino acids in life, including plants, animals, bacteria, molds, and even viruses, are essentially all left-handed.b No known natural process can isolate either the left-handed or right-handed variety. The mathematical probability that chance processes could produce merely one tiny protein molecule with only left-handed amino acids is virtually zero.c
A similar observation can be made for a special class of organic compounds calledsugars. In living systems, sugars are all right-handed. Based on our present understanding, natural processes produce equal proportions of left-handed and right-handed sugars. Because sugars in living things are right-handed, random natural processes apparently did not produce life.
If any living thing took in (or ate) amino acids or sugars with the wrong handedness, the organisms body could not process it. Such food would be useless, if not harmful. Because evolution favors slight variations that enhance survivability and produce more offspring, consider how advantageous a mutation might be that switched (or inverted) a plants handedness. Inverted (or wrong-handed) trees would proliferate rapidly, because they would no longer provide nourishment to bacteria, mold, or termites.Inverted forests would fill the continents. Otherinverted plants and animals would also benefit and would overwhelm the balance of nature. Why do we not see such species with right-handed amino acids and left-handed sugars? Similarly, why are there not more poisonous plants? Why doesnt any beneficial mutation permit its carriers to swamp most predators? Beneficial mutations are rarer than evolutionists believe. [See Mutations on page 7.]