I believe most of my readers have operative brains and inquisitive enquiring minds that pursue the truth valiantly A careful read of this article below, about RNA, should make it obvious that inert molecules do not arrange themselves into such intricate life forming structures like this, without a master creator designer. Follow Shaun Doyle as he leads a “Doubting Thomas” through the minefield of evolutionistic “logic”.
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Despite this, he sent in more papers. So we thought it was a good place to take apart some representative papers, as well as deal with what we think is the real issue. We hope that not just Ahmed might benefit, but also others in his same mindset. It shows that the RNA polymerase ribozyme was engineered to replicate a functional ribozyme.
He writes:
There is a recent study titled RNA-catalyzed evolution of catalytic RNA which published in (PNAS) on March 4, 2024, Which says “RNA polymerase ribozyme that was obtained by directed evolution can propagate a functional RNA through repeated rounds of replication and selection, thereby enabling Darwinian evolution. Earlier versions of the polymerase did not have sufficient copying fidelity to propagate functional information, but a new variant with improved fidelity can replicate the hammerhead ribozyme through reciprocal synthesis of both the hammerhead and its complement, with the products then being selected for RNA-cleavage activity . Two evolutionary lines were carried out in parallel, using either the prior low-fidelity or the newer high-fidelity polymerase, Did this study really provide good evidence that supports the RNA world hypothesis?
CMI’s Shaun Doyle responds (Click on Shaun’s name for his biography).
Dear A.
Thanks for writing in.
I have to be frank: do you even understand the abstracts of these PNAS articles that are giving you so much grief? Take the first sentence of the abstract you quote from in this comment:
An RNA polymerase ribozyme that was obtained by directed evolution can propagate a functional RNA through repeated rounds of replication and selection, thereby enabling Darwinian evolution.1
First, how did they obtain the RNA polymerase ribozyme? “Directed evolution”. Does this mean it evolved via natural mechanisms? It means the opposite; it was engineered. It’s a protein engineering method2 that generates mutants from which the researchers select the mutants that best fit what they’re looking for, replicate those, subject them to more rounds of mutagenesis and selection, until they find what they’re looking for. Why does this matter? It shows that the RNA polymerase ribozyme was engineered to replicate a functional ribozyme. All this paper shows is that this is the best example they’ve managed to engineer so far. An interesting exercise in organic chemical engineering, to be sure.
But relevant to chemical evolution? Not at all. For it to be relevant, it has to be assumed that this thing could plausibly arise solely via mindless causes. But there’s no reason for us to assume that. In fact, the very difficulty of generating it is evidence against mindless causes. RNA and its building blocks are very unstable (see also the chemical problems with the RNA world.
Second, have they actually shown RNA self-replication? No. The RNA polymerase ribozyme facilitated the replication of a different ribozyme. As the commentary states:
Here, a twofold change in the error rate of the RNA polymerase ribozyme led to the first RNA-catalyzed ribozyme replication and evolution cycle. This new functionality is heading toward something profound: RNA self-replication. If the RNA polymerase ribozyme could complete a full replication cycle of not only the hammerhead ribozyme, but of its own sequence, the system will meet a widely accepted definition of life as a “self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”.3
If you engineer a self-replicating system, have you thereby proved that it can arise from scratch without intelligent input? Of course not!
This is not a self-replicating RNA system. Of course, they’re hopeful that they’re on the right track to produce a self-replicating RNA system. And they might be! Who knows? But here’s the thing: if they achieve that, they will have engineered it. If you engineer a self-replicating system, have you thereby proved that it can arise from scratch without intelligent input? Of course not!
Third, why think Darwinian evolution from such a system could eventually produce a free-living cell? A free-living cell is clearly the last universal common ancestor (LUCA). That’s the target they’re aiming at. These studies have to show natural causes plausibly suffice to generate the LUCA from abiotic materials in the timeframe and conditions they posit. However, the system the paper investigates is solely RNA. What sort of mutations could allow it to bring in entirely different classes of biomolecules, such as polysaccharides, DNA, lipids, and proteins, to create a much more complex system? And this assumes that such biomolecules could themselves develop naturalistically in the same environments as the RNA system. But evolving from an RNA system to a multi-biomolecule cellular system for which DNA, not RNA, is the prime information storage molecule, is a black box that dwarfs anything that supposedly evolved since the LUCA.
There is no reason to think this study has any relevance to how life supposedly arose from abiotic materials without intelligent input. It’s an engineered system. It still can’t self-replicate. And even if it could, such a system is thoroughly unrelated to the supposedly mindless origin of cellular life, which incorporates many more biomolecules than just RNA.
Dealing with doubts
More could probably be said about the specifics of the study than I have already said, especially if I could read the paper in full. For instance, how did they sustain the RNA polymerase ribozyme? It also had to be by investigator interference, since they admit they don’t have a self-replicating RNA system yet. Moreover, what sort of concentrations of these molecules are needed to keep the system going? Those are usually bolstered by investigator interference beyond anything plausible in a wild environment.
But I want to take some time to address the underlying problem you seem to be dealing with. It’s not these OOL studies. It sounds to me like these studies are the symptom, not the cause, of your struggle. In the way you’ve sent comments to us, a consistent pattern has emerged: you come across one study, don’t know how to deal with its specifics, panic and run to an authority you trust for help responding to it, feel some momentary relief when the response comes. And then? You dive back into the same literature and find yourself drowning in doubt almost as soon as you last got out of trouble. And the cycle repeats again and again.
Do you know why you keep going round in circles like this? I laid out some of the problems people face in my article Reading ‘origin of life’ research: How to read the secular literature on chemical evolution (i.e. ‘abiogenesis’) critically. I wrote that article specifically because I’ve seen several people go through the same cycle of doubt-relief-doubt as you do, and specifically with the origin of life literature. Please digest this article carefully (as my colleagues had previously asked you to do). And note: many of the lessons in this article are replicable to any subject matter.
But one thing I didn’t cover in that article is some of the psychosocial factors that can induce this doubt spiral in people (see e.g. When we let the doubts win, Doubt your doubts!, and Nagging doubts). Let me ask: did you grow up in a religious home? Are you just now finding yourself for the first time facing a secular academic context? If so, this can be a serious culture shock. The only world you’ve known is a religious one. But then you’re thrust into a culture that does one of two things.
First, it can actively strive to make your religious culture look silly. There are many secular professors who actively try to deconvert religious people—or more correctly: convert them to their own religion of naturalistic humanism.
Second, the instructors of this perspective are so deeply engrained in it that they can’t even fathom anymore (if they ever could) why someone would find any religious worldview compelling. Such people may not actively seek to convert you to non-religious humanism; they just go about their lives in that rubric. But simply in doing that they can present a ‘compelling’ way of navigating reality in that frame that it can stand as a powerful testimony for it. And the more positive relationships you form with such people, and especially if they take on a mentoring role to you, it’s a simple fact of human social psychology that you will likely feel more drawn to their worldview.
And note that a similar sense of ‘culture shock’ can happen even if you’re still at home, or you’re a recent convert to a religious worldview, and you’re just starting to read this sort of literature. Why? Because you’re being exposed to the secular academic culture through these papers. And the more time you spend poring over them, the more you’re immersing yourself in that secular culture. As a result, everything else around you can begin to seem ‘unreal’ in comparison. I know; I spend a lot of time in the secular literature online and by myself, and I often feel this struggle.
The danger you can face in such a situation is that it’s ripe for people to begin suffering from an overactive need for cognitive closure.4 When you find yourself interacting with a lot of smart people you relate with well, though they think your way of viewing the world is somehow wrong or even rationally defective, it’s natural to feel like, to keep your faith afloat, you need to have intellectual ‘knockout punches’ to any little mystery or doubt that might arise. If you don’t have that, it can easily feel like you’ve got countless fingers on very smart hands all pointing at you because you’re an idiot. And the pressure to cave in to secular culture at that point can easily overwhelm people. It has overwhelmed many. We live by faith and not by sight.
Here’s the thing: not only are such ‘knockout punches’ pretty much non-existent, you don’t even need them. You really don’t! We live in what I like to term a ‘fog-of-war world’. What do I mean? Basically, in a war, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s happening. Where you are. Where the enemy is. What they’re doing. Why they’re doing it. There’s a lot of noise flying around about what’s going on that it’s hard to see the signals about what’s really happening.
I don’t know if you come from a Christian perspective, or maybe an Islamic one. But I’m going to speak from a Christian perspective, because I believe it’s true, and I also think it offers the best way to respond. Question: does the Bible ever describe our spiritual situation as if we’re in a war? Yes it does (Ephesians 6:10–20). Is there a lot of uncertainty in this life? Yes there is. Even, and especially, about spiritual things. We live by faith and not by sight. So, are we in a ‘fog of war’ world? Yes we are.
And what are we called to do in this ‘fog of war’ world? Trust God and lean not on our own understanding (Proverbs 3:5). Trust He has it all sorted. Trust He knows what he’s doing. And trust that it will be good. He gives us signs that give us sufficient reason to trust Him. Such as general revelation, Jesus, the Bible, and the Spirit. But note what the signs are for. Are they meant to remove the fog? No. They are for trusting God in the fog. So, don’t expect reason to do more, regarding God, than what He designed it to do. This doesn’t mean we don’t use reason or science; it just means we submit our understanding of both to God in Scripture (Loving God with all your mind: logic and creation).
And also note: are the secularists in a ‘fog of war’ world? Of course they are! They’re cognition is just as human as ours. They live in the same world as us. So, do they have mysteries, problems, and doubts about their view? Of course they do! you will not be free of doubt if you embrace secularism.
But if that’s so, why exchange your current set of mysteries, problems, and doubts for theirs? One doubt that plagues me about any sort of non-religious secularism is ‘why should I care?’ On such views, why should I care about anything? I’m asking for something specific: a categorical duty to care. I can identify all sorts of conditional duties that could arise, i.e. if I want X then I should care about Y. But I then keep asking: why should I want X? I struggle to see any way for me, if I were a secularist, to come to a satisfying answer to that question. At the very least, this is a doubt that would constantly plague my mind if I were a secularist (When atheism seems easy).
Other doubts could be mentioned (e.g. The epistemic abyss of naturalistic evolution). But the point is: you will not be free of doubt if you embrace secularism. So, you should be fair to both sides. If you’re going to panic about doubts around your own views, you should also look for and pour over reasons to doubt the secularistic perspective with equal vigour. Don’t let their doubts get the benefit of the doubt over yours!
In light of this, you really need to develop a systematic approach to dealing with doubt. We are an information ministry, and we don’t have the manpower to keep walking you through every paper that causes you to doubt. Even this answer took quite some time and effort for me to craft, and my colleagues also spent much time. Our writers don’t have time to keep doing this for you. So, please make use of the articles I’ve linked to: they can help you. But you will struggle to do it effectively without prayer, Bible reading, and support from a Bible-believing community. Find someone in your life to walk through these issues with. And pick what you read carefully. Only read this stuff if and when you have to.
Kind regards, Shaun Doyle Creation Ministries International
Published: 14 September 2024
References and notes
Papastavrou, N., Horning, D.P., and Joyce, G.F., RNA-catalyzed evolution of catalytic RNA, PNAS121(11):e2321592121, 12 March 2024. Return to text.
Directed evolution, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_evolution, accessed 7 May 2024. Return to text.
Chen, I.A., RNA life on the edge of catastrophe, PNAS121(13):e2402649121, 13 March 2024. Return to text.
Closure (psychology), en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(psychology), accessed 7 May 2024. Return to text.
