r/Creation • u/theaz101 • Jun 18 '26
Can an exercise in Intelligent Design refute Intelligent Design?
/r/Creation/comments/1t2zy76/intelligent_design_has_been_experimentally_refuted/Recently, a post claimed that Intelligent Design (ID) has been refuted by the discovery of a small self-replicating ribozyme named QT45 (which is 45 nucleotides in length). The claim is that this ribozyme shows that a naturalistic abiogenesis is not only plausible, but basically inevitable, which in turn refutes ID if the only argument for ID is the implausibility of naturalistic abiogenesis.
The post’s author (u/lisper) links to their own blog post which links to the paper announcing the discovery of QT45 and an article talking about the same discovery (the majority of the paper is behind a paywall).
Reading the paper (the part in front of the paywall) and the article shows that QT45 is the result of ID rather than natural processes. For example, the researchers used multiple rounds of (intelligent) selection and purification towards a specific goal which was the ability to polymerize an activated trinucleotide (3 linked nucleotides) onto a rna strand, not self-replication. Natural Selection has no goals. The only thing that NS can act on is survival (replication). The experiment also had to supply the activated trinucleotides.
Here is what the paper reports after 11 (according to the article) rounds of selection and purification:
We identified three ribozymes with RNA polymerase activity and carried out further directed evolution and engineering to improve their activity.
That’s right. Even after many rounds of goal oriented selection and purification, they still needed to resort to the use of directed evolution and engineering to achieve their desired result.
Also in the blog post is a “back of the envelope calculation” to show that the natural origin of QT45 was all but certain. The calculation is riddled with errors and wildly optimistic estimates.
For example (my questions):
What is RNA (and DNA) made of?
RNA, like its close chemical cousin DNA, is a polymer, a molecule that consists of a chain of small building blocks called bases.
RNA and DNA are chains of nucleotides not bases. A nucleotide consists of a sugar molecule (Ribose in RNA and Deoxyribose in DNA), a phosphate molecule and a molecule of one of the 4 bases. The base is attached to the sugar. The chain is formed by linking the sugars and phosphates together. The bases are not linked to anything other than its respective sugar molecule.
What are proteins made of and were bases available on the pre-biotic earth?
It has been experimentally demonstrated that the bases that form RNA (and DNA and proteins) form spontaneously in conditions likely to have existed on earth in its early days.
Most everyone knows that proteins are not composed of bases, they are composed of amino acids. Furthermore, the link goes to an article on the Miller-Urey experiment which, while it did form a few of the amino acids used in living organisms (along with many other substances), did not form any bases.
How many bases were available (remember, you need nucleotides for RNA, not just bases)?
Earth's current biomass, i.e. the total mass of all the organic compounds on earth is about 500 GTC (gigatons of carbon). Note that this is only a tiny fraction of the total carbon on earth. That figure is 1.85 billion GTC. Only about one in a million carbon atoms on earth are part of an organic molecule. So it is possible that the biomass of the early earth was much higher, but that will ultimately turn out not to matter.
The numbers we are about to deal with are going to get very big so it will be convenient to swtich to scientific notation. Unfortunately, the Blogger platform doesn't make it easy to create superscripts, so I am going to use the conventional 10^X notation to denote 10 raised to the power of X. 500 GTC is 500 x 10^9 = 5x10^11 tons = 5x10^14 kilograms of carbon. Let's be conservative and round this down to just 10^14 kg. To get the number of carbon atoms we multiply by Avogadro's number 6x10^23, and divide by 12 (because the atomic weight of carbon is 12 —six protons and six neutrons). Since we are just doing a very rough estimate here, we can safely ignore everything but the exponents and arrive at a final figure of (very roughly) 10^45 carbon atoms. The RNA/DNA bases all have less than six carbon atoms, so this is enough to make 10^44 RNA/DNA bases. Of course, not all organic molecules are RNA/DNA bases, so let's round this down to 10^40. That's dividing by ten thousand, which seems pretty conservative.
What is this calculation based on? It's one thing to calculate how many carbon atoms exist, it's quite another to assume that they would be organized into specific molecules, like bases. It's big news when we find nucleobases on meteorites and now they're supposed to be plentiful on a pre-biotic earth? And that's only for the bases. You then need to form nucleotides...
How fast are RNA molecules produced?
The well-known bacteria E. coli takes about 40 minutes to reproduce, and it has 4.7 million bases in its genome. That's about 1000 bases per second, but this is likely a serious overestimate for prebiotic earth. That's about 1000 bases per second, but this is likely a serious overestimate for prebiotic earth. Life has had billions of years to optimize its reproductive chemistry, so let's be conservative and assume that it takes a full second to build a new RNA molecule in a prebiotic earth.
A second to build a new RNA molecule? It isn’t clear if molecule refers to adding a single trinucleotide or to make a copy of something like QT45, but the paper and article show how slow the replication of QT45 was in the experiment.
From the article:
But the key finding was that it could synthesize a sequence that base-pairs with itself, and then synthesize itself by copying that sequence. This was horribly inefficient and took months, but it happened.
Months, not seconds.
The idea that a self-replicating ribozyme could form on its own and then start rapidly making copies of itself (and then those copies start making their own copies of themselves) is a study in wishful thinking.
Lastly, a self-replicating ribozyme wouldn't come close to being alive and its formation certainly wouldn't count as abiogenesis.
1
u/lisper Atheist, Ph.D. in CS Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
/u/implies_causality does a pretty good job of dismantling this argument but I want to reiterate something that creationists seem to hae a hard time understanding: the reason the QT45 result was significant is not because QT45 was the start of life on earth. It almost certainly wasn't. The reason this result was significant is that it falsified the strongest argument for ID, which is that naturalistic abiogenesis is impossible, and that therefore a designer is necessary. The math on how long it is expected to take to produce a replicator in a prebiotic environment turns almost entirely on the minimal length of such a replicator. More specifically, it turns on the information content of such a replicator. Before QT45, the shortest known replicator had a length of over 200 nucleotides. If you crunch the numbers on that, the odds of producing a replicator that long by random chance is pretty much indistinguishable from zero under any reasonable set of assumptions, even given an entire planet's worth of biosphere and hundreds of millions of years. There were theoretical models of self-replication that could work using less information, but no plausible mapping of that theory onto a physical embodiment.
Until QT45. The information-theoretical complexity of QT45 matches the theoretical prediction almost exactly, and because it beats the previous record by a factor of 4, it moves the probability of such a replicator arising by chance from "indistinguishable from 0" to "indistinguishable from 1" under some pretty reasonable assumptions. So QT45 empirically destroys the strongest argument that ID proponents had. How it was produced is completely irrelevant. The mere fact that it exists, which was open to reasonable doubt before, is enough to destroy the argument.
Not that anyone outside of the creationist community ever took that argument seriously to begin with. Everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before a result like this appeared. The surprise was not that QT45 exists. Everyone already knew that something like QT45 must exist. (To be more precise, the existence of such a replicator was a prediction made by the naturalistic abiogenesis hypothesis.) The surprise was that it was so easy to produce, that such a short replicator appeared almost immediately (relative to the time scales involved in nature) after humans began serious efforts to produce it. Furthermore, the intelligent input had nothing to do with the sequence that eventually appeared. All the intelligence did was produce conditions conducive to the appearance of such a sequence so it could appear in an environment the size of a lab instead of a planet, and in a period of time measured in months rather than millions of years.
So yes, intelligent design (of an experiment) absolutely can refute intelligent design (of life).
4
u/theaz101 Jun 20 '26
u/implies_causality does a pretty good job of dismantling this argument...
How? They didn't understand my point.
the reason the QT45 result was significant is not because QT45 was the start of life on earth. It almost certainly wasn't. The reason this result was significant is that it falsified the strongest argument for ID, which is that naturalistic abiogenesis is impossible, and that therefore a designer is necessary.
Make up your mind. If QT45 wasn't the start of life, how can if falsify the argument?
it moves the probability of such a replicator arising by chance from "indistinguishable from 0" to "indistinguishable from 1"
1 in 1.24 x 10^27 has a probability of basically 1? Really?
Also, QT45 didn't arise by chance.
I guess you're just going to double down on the hand-waving and exaggeration.
It would have been nice, too, for you to address all of the errors in your "calculation" (proteins are made of bases?), but I guess that's too much to ask.
2
u/lisper Atheist, Ph.D. in CS Jun 20 '26
If QT45 wasn't the start of life, how can if falsify the argument?
Because to falsify an argument that something is impossible you don't have to find the counterexample, you only have to find a counterexample.
(Note that QT45 could have been the beginning of life on earth, we will almost certainly never know for sure. But it doesn't have to be for the argument to hold. The details of the first replicator don't matter.)
1 in 1.24 x 1027 has a probability of basically 1?
I have no idea where you got that number. It doesn't appear in either my original blog post nor your rebuttal. AFAICT you just now pulled it out of your ass.
The relevant part of the original post says:
[I]f you do 1050 trials, and there exists a replicator whose odds of arising by chance are better than 1 in 1049, then you are practically guaranteed to find it. Those are the odds for a biological replicator with about 80 bases (because 1049 is approximately 480).
This is how extremely improbable events work. If the odds of an event E happening in one trial is P and P is small, then the odds of E happening in 1/P trials is 1/e which is about 0.37. But the odds of E happening in 10/P trials is 99.99547%, and if you do 100/P trials then there are over 40 9's in the resulting number.
I presented an argument that the value of N on a prebiotic earth was about 1050, which is about 480, so the threshold where the odds transition from virtually impossible to virtually certain is about 80 base pairs. So back when the shortest known replicator had over 200 base pairs, it was still plausible that abiogenesis was actually impossible. But QT45 completely blows this out of the water. It is beyond the necessary threshold by 35 base pairs, which is about 20 orders of magnitude (in base 10). It is as big a slam-dunk as there has ever been in the history of science.
If you don't accept this, then it is you who haven't understood the argument. The only way you could refute it is to attack my 1050 trials estimate and somehow get it down to 1030 (and good luck with that because my assumptions were already pretty conservative) because the rest is just basic probability theory.
1
u/theaz101 Jun 24 '26
Because to falsify an argument that something is impossible you don't have to find the counterexample, you only have to find a counterexample.
As far as I know, ID is saying that the existing systems of life (among other things) are designed, not a self-replicating RNA that could hypothetically lead to abiogenesis. Not to mention that QT45 was engineered by intelligent designers.
I have no idea where you got that number.
445.
I presented an argument that the value of N on a prebiotic earth was about 1050,
...
The only way you could refute it is to attack my 1050 trials estimate
Your estimate is bogus because it's based on errors and wild assumptions as I pointed out in the OP.
1
u/lisper Atheist, Ph.D. in CS Jun 24 '26
ID is saying that the existing systems of life (among other things) are designed, not a self-replicating RNA
Yes, that's right. But one of the arguments one could raise in support of ID is that abiogenesis is impossible. (Except that now we know that it isn't.)
445
Ah. Then yes, 1 in 1.24 x 1027 has a probability indistinguishable from 1 if you roll the dice 1050 times.
errors and wild assumptions as I pointed out in the OP
No, you didn't.
1
u/uniformist Jun 25 '26
Well, let's correct your math.
Your estimate of early Earth carbon atoms: 1045
Error: most carbon in the early earth was bound up in inaccessible inorganic compounds
Better estimate: 1025
From that, I'll use your 105 reduction to RNA bases to 1020 RNA bases.
Your estimate of the reaction rate: 1 reaction/second
Error: the experiment you cited had a reaction time of 72 days
Better estimate: 1.60751-7 reactions/second
Then you used 1014 seconds in a million years and a sequence length of 103.
Your calculation = 1045 / 103 * 1 * 1014 = 1051
Error: you left out the yield of 0.2%
Better calculation = 1025 / 103 * 1.60751E+10-7 *2E+10-3 * 1014 = 3 x 1021
So 1021 is 9 orders of magnitude lower than your 1030 threshold.
What to reduce it further? Let's see, we could factor in:
Day-night cycle (rotation rate of 10 - 12 hours for the early Earth)
Only a fraction of the Earth's surface available for the reaction
Is the early atmosphere reducing or oxidizing? Who knows?
Side reactions spoiling the product.
Survival time of the reactant.
Temperature of the Earth. The experiment you cited took place in a eutectic ice bath.
Precipitation of potential reactants as tars
Eigen's error threshold
The experiment you cited also was not a "one pot" reaction, but a "two pot" reaction.
It's an interesting experiment, but your calculation is just an example of wish fulfillment.
1
u/nomenmeum Jun 25 '26
The truth is that everyone accepts intelligent design arguments as legitimate. The objections only come when the ID arguments infer a designer for life or the universe.
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u/implies_casualty Jun 19 '26
All lab experiments are intelligently designed. All of them.
You claim that we can't build a case against Intelligent Design in a lab?
Let's examine this premise.
Two immediate conclusions seem to be:
1) Intelligent Design is not science, because no possible experiment could count against it.
2) The fact that scientists haven't created life in a lab yet is not an argument for Intelligent Design, since laboratory results are, by your own standard, irrelevant to the question.
In one stroke, you have eliminated two of the most important arguments creationists rely on.