My husband-to -be really should have gotten a clue that he was not in for a simple married life when I thought it was a good idea to grow our own daisies for our wedding . It’s not that I don’t want a simple life…it’s just that it seems to be…well, impossible. It’s also compounded by the fact that the grand ideas I have generally become too big for me to handle and then I drag every willing and unwilling soul in to help. Daisies really were just the beginning…
Our son’s 4th birthday party with a dinosaur theme quickly involved building giant paper mache volcanoes that erupted. This of course begged dry ice and baking soda and vinegar and an extensive play list of dinosaur marching songs…while my husband quietly wondered what was wrong with a party at Chucky Cheese. He was probably lamenting this while he helped the Dinosaur Bounce House lady tie down the ferocious fire breathing monster that threatened to take down the fence in our back yard as it was being put up.
Or there was the time I volunteered to help my son’s entire first grade class of 22 students bake Amish bread cornucopias from scratch for a Thanksgiving craft. Yes, I realize I didn’t think it would take half the night to make, roll out, cut and prep several hundred little strips of dough. Or that baking a bazillion cornucopias and adding sweet little Thanksgiving notes to them in the 3 hours I had from when the kids finished making them to when they needed them to bring home would require more than just my two hands and good intentions.
We won’t even mention when I tried to make the entire family’s Star Wars Halloween costumes using fabric glue, or the Medieval Birthday party where we made all the shields from scratch and had a family crest and a life sized dragon sewn to hang on the walls.
And I wonder why my husband whimpers whenever I announce, “I’ve been thinking…”
But you know…they all turn out, in the end, really well, in that memories are made that our kids bask in and never forget about. Schemes that come to fruition when it’s all said and done were worth the crazy effort put into it. And I am so grateful for a husband and family that realize that, with me, there is no such thing as simple…
You see, that’s why I understand, what I am sure, is the righteous indignation of the Amoeba.
It is so often dubbed a “simple one celled life form”. Or one of the first basic forms of life to evolve from the primordial stew”. Hmmph! Simple indeed! If you care to look a little closer, there is no such thing as simple with an Amoeba… and the assertion that it could have simply happened by random collisions of simple proteins…is well, laughable. Dare I say it? Impossible by chance.
Because I understand that it is an insult to be labeled as “simple” … I stand with the amoeba to plead its case.
Evolutionary scientists theorize that simple chemicals in a “pre-biotic” earth linked together, perhaps when lightning struck the earth to form amino acids and then, simple proteins. Given enough time (millions of years) and random collisions, these proteins were able to organize and eventually form simple life forms. Enter the Amoeba, simple archaic bacteria and other one celled organisms.
Sounds plausible? I suppose…
Stanley Miller, a professor at the University of Chicago, was able to create simple amino acids by trying to recreate, what he theorized, was a replication of the chemicals in the primordial soup. This experiment was lauded by famous scientists and printed in biology text books nationwide. Many thought this was proof that simple amino acids, and therefore simple life forms, could be created randomly.
However, after many years it was shown by many scientists, including some at NASA, that the earth’s atmosphere could not possibly have contained the gases used in this experiment… thus invalidating the whole experiment. Interestingly enough, this experiment is still taught as fact in many schools and is still in text books even today!
Evolutionary scientists are still wringing their hands trying to figure out how those first amino acids (which are the building blocks of the proteins that make up our body) could have been randomly formed. I could give them a few ideas found in Genesis 1…hmmmmm
Before I go back to defending the Amoeba, I should say, one of the tenets on which biology is found is that there is no such thing as spontaneous generation of living things. That is, we no longer believe maggots arose spontaneously from rotting meat and other such notions that went out with the realization the world wasn’t flat. However, evolutionary science would have to somehow make an exception to this law to claim living things such as my amoeba came from non living things like methane gas and lightning.
But, let’s give these scientists a little latitude for a moment…a little rope, if you will. Let’s say they were able to organize these amino acids into simple proteins. Let’s say that randomly these proteins overcome a host of issues that can’t be explained by any evolutionary scientist (such as chirality, but that’s another blog entirely) and there in the bubbling early earth soup were all the proteins needed to create life…what would happen then? Think about it. Would that be enough to prove living things could be created by the gathering together of the right proteins?
Let’s bring in our amoeba. Her name is Amazing Amy. She is one celled and a sophisticated, independent, assertive phenomenon. She is beautiful and moves with fluid motion as she goes about her business.
She gathers her own food and digests it, she avoids danger, she keeps the chemical and water balance of her body constant and when she grows to a certain size, copies her DNA and makes a little daughter cell clone to carry on the tradition.
Did you gloss over that bombshell you just read?
Read that last sentence again. Did you miss the part where it said DNA? Yes, friends, Deoxyribonucleic acid!
Say that wonderfully convoluted word again because it is every bit as complicated as it sounds, and then some!
DNA is the blueprint for life. Every single living thing needs DNA so that the code for every detail and action that is performed within its body will have a set of instructions to follow. No organism can be counted as a living thing if it does not have DNA!
Why is DNA so important?
1. 1. It carries all the genetic information for an organism. Every protein that is made happens only because DNA has a specific code to manufacture the amino acids that make the protein, then it puts these amino acids together in the right order, then it folds the protein into just the right shape, then it sends the protein where it needs to go to perform its job. Multiply that by the thousands of unique proteins in an organism and you see the daunting task DNA has. Protein cannot be made without DNA!
2. 2.Information is passed down to the next generation through DNA. There is a very complex system through which DNA makes copies of itself and then divides the cell so more copies of itself will be made. Organisms cannot make babies without DNA.
3. 3.DNA is very complicated!! It is one thing for evolutionary scientists to say that very simple amino acids can be formed through random collisions (when they have tinkered with the conditions to make it optimal). It is quite another to say DNA could be made randomly.
DNA contains the alphabet from which the words and sentences and the great novel from which living things are made.
If the Encyclopedia Britannica was cut up into its individual letters and then thrown in the air millions of times, do you suppose it would fall to the ground in such a way that the letters would be in the same order and meaning they were in before the Encyclopedia was cut up? I’ll let you answer that one, because that’s what it would take for DNA to form randomly. There is no such thing as a simple organism because all organisms are based on extremely complicated DNA.
Amazing Amy Amoeba would like me to tell you she is not simple and random. She is not a coincidence! She’s got DNA folks and she’s got skills! She’s sassy and sophisticated and the very opposite of simple!
Instead Amazing Amy is an expression of the complexity that could only come from an Intelligent, Omniscient, Divine mind. My Amy is a testament to the Glory of an all Powerful God! My Amy knows, as I do, that also for God, there is no such thing as simple!
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