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100 Reasons to Choose Biblical Creation Over Evolution
19. Chemical Pathways
Cells contain certain chemicals, which are absolutely essential for their survival and the quantities of these chemicals are controlled within the cell by a complex regulatory system. When the cell needs to produce more of a certain chemical, the signal is given, and the command to produce more is sent. The production of these chemicals is fantastically complex, often including the production of numerous chemical precursors before the final, necessary chemical is producedA.
Although some of these essential chemicals do occur in nature, nature does not produce them in a process that looks anything remotely like the complex chemical pathways seen in living things. If cells really evolved in step-by-step fashion over millions of years, then how do we explain these chemical pathways? The dilemma is utterly devastating to the evolution story. If the cell absolutely needs the final product of a long chemical pathway, then why in the world did it evolve the complex steps to produce the numerous chemical precursors?
Are we to suppose that the first developing cell, still not truly alive and able to reproduce, managed to survive for millions of years while a massive amount of genetic information was added to it, slowly endowing it with the information and structures necessary to make the numerous chemical precursors, before finally arriving at the chemical it actually needed for survival? Anyone that can swallow such a story cannot object to the belief in miracles.
19.Chemical Pathways - Notes and References
A. Behe, Darwin's Black Box, p. 151: "The problem for Darwinian evolution is this: if only the end product of a complicated biosynthetic pathway is used in the cell, how did the pathway evolve in steps?…On their face, metabolic pathways where intermediates are not useful present severe challenges to a Darwinian scheme of evolution."