Authorities Spur Wrong Ideas About the Complexity of Proteins

Protein molecules are the most basic functional components of living things. In the human body there are more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules. Each is a different type of invention in our bodies. How many amino acids are in the most complex human proteins? This question has great relevance to the credibility of claims such as Darwinism. If protein molecules consisted of only a few amino acids, then we might easily believe that the different types of protein molecules arose by chance. But if each type of protein molecule consists of a specific arrangement of very many amino acids, such a claim is much harder to believe. 

In general, the more well-arranged parts something has, the harder it is to believe that such a thing arose by chance rather by design or deliberate intention. For example, suppose you enter someone's house and see a bunch of Scrabble blocks on someone's table. If you see the word "cat" consisting of three letters, it's not too hard to believe the word appeared by chance, perhaps by someone just dumping the Scrabble letters on the table. But if you see on the table written in Scrabble letters a full sentence such as "I very much love the purring sound my cat makes," then it is vastly harder to believe such an arrangement appeared by chance.  And suppose you see on the table  written in Scrabble letters a long sentence such as this: "The day that my mother gave me my wonderful cat Mittens as an adorable young kitten was the happiest day of my life, and every day that my cat Mittens has lived with me has been a better day because of her wonderful presence and her soothing purring sound."  Then it becomes quite impossible to logically believe that such a sentence appeared by chance. 

As these examples show, the more well-arranged parts something has, the harder it is to believe that such a thing arose by chance rather by design or deliberate intention. So the question of how many amino acids are in proteins is a question of very great relevance to the credibility of Darwinism. What kind of answers do we get upon using a search engine to search for how many amino acids are in a protein? We often get some answers that give us very wrong ideas. Doing a Google search using the phrase "number of amino acids in a protein," we get many a bum steer. 

The main answers you get when using a search phrase of "number of amino acids in a protein" are utterly wrong answers of 20.  That is an answer to a different question: the question of how many types of amino acids are used by proteins. 

We can only imagine how many millions of people have been misled on this very important matter by the bad answer Google gives here. How many times have there been conversations like this?

Joe: Jane, I think large organisms such as humans are too complex to have arisen by blind processes such as Darwinian evolution. Take protein molecules, for example. We're built from protein molecules, but they're just too complex to have formed by blind processes. 

Jane: No, you're wrong. Protein molecules are simple. Look I'll Google for the answer. Here's what you get when you type "number of amino acids in a protein." You see? It's only 20.

Joe: Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle. I would have SWORN I read somewhere that protein molecules consist of very many well-arranged parts. But you can't argue with Google. If Google says protein molecules have only 20 parts, I guess that must be right. 

To get the right answer about the number of amino acids parts in a protein molecule, you must be careful to ask just exactly the right question:

Google search phrase	First answer Google gives	Is answer correct?
Number of amino acids in a protein	20	No. 20 is the answer to a different question: “how many types of amino acids are used by proteins?”
How many parts in a protein molecule	The only number you get in the first answer is 20: “All proteins are made up of different arrangements of the same 20 kinds of amino acids.”	Technically correct, but prone to give the wrong idea, since most protein molecules consist of hundreds or thousands of amino acids parts, each of which consist of 10 to 20 atoms.
How complex is a protein molecule	The only number you get in the first answers is 20.	The answers are technically correct, but tend to give quick readers the wrong idea that protein molecules consist of only 20 amino acids
Average number of amino acids in a protein	“Proteins come in a wide variety of shapes, and they are generally between 50 and 2000 amino acids long.”	Yes.

Since people searching for information about the complexity of protein molecules would be far more likely to use the first three of these searches rather than the last one, a very large fraction of people searching for information about the complexity of protein molecules will be given a wrong idea. 

Below are the results with the Microsoft Bing search engine (www.bing.com), which are even worse than the results from Google.

Bing search phrase	First answer Bing gives	Is answer correct?
Number of amino acids in a protein	20 "according to 5 sources"	No. 20 is the answer to a different question: “how many types of amino acids are used by proteins?”
How many parts in a protein molecule	Twenty amino acids.	No.  20 is the answer to a different question: “how many types of amino acids are used by proteins?"
How complex is a protein molecule	After a bad large-font answer of "amino acids," there is a small font answer saying "Proteins are made up of hundreds or thousands of smaller units called amino acids, which are attached to one another in long chains."	After a bad and confusing answer in a large font, we get a right answer in a small font.
Average number of amino acids in a protein	20.	No.  20 is an entirely inappropriate response to this search phrase, but is a correct answer to the question: “how many types of amino acids are used by proteins?”

Why are the results above so bad? One may reasonably wonder whether nothing has been done to prevent bad or misleading answers to these crucially important search phrases because our authorities do not want us to know how many well-arranged parts are in protein molecules.  Perhaps this is because the better you understand the complexity of protein molecules, the less likely you will be to believe mainstream accounts of their unguided origin. 

There is another way for trying to look into the complexity of protein molecules: a person can inquire about how large are the largest protein molecules. In Google a straightforward way to use the search phrase "most complex protein molecules." The first page of search results will not give you a single answer telling you that the most complex protein molecules have thousands of amino acids. The first answer is a bad answer of "quaternary structure." That is the most complex of four types of protein structure, but not an indication of how complex the most complex protein molecules are.  Then there are the other answers in the search results that refer to the important topic of protein complexes. But nowhere on the first page of search results do we get the simple correct answer: that the most complex protein molecules consist of thousands of amino acids. The same thing happens on the Bing search engine. If you type the search phrase "most complex protein molecules," you will get a page of search results, none of which tell you that the most complex protein molecules consist of thousands of amino acids. 

Another way in which authorities give us misleading ideas about protein complexity is by their visuals of proteins. Visuals of protein structure follow an odd set of conventions:

(1) Proteins structure visuals are not made in a way that give you any idea about how many amino acids the proteins consist of. 

(2) Proteins structure visuals are not made in a way that give you any idea about how many atoms the proteins consist of.

(3) Proteins structure visuals typically are in a way that gives you the incorrect idea that the protein molecule consists of only a small number of parts, even when the molecules usually consists of 400 or more well-arranged amino acids, which altogether consists of more than 5000 well-arranged atoms.  

I can give you an example. The link here takes you to a page depicting an IMKO protein. On the page we have this protein structure visual:

If you are an average person judging how complex this molecule is, how many amino acids would you guess the molecule has, based on this visual? Maybe about four, because we see about four different units, each with a different color. But this protein molecule consists of 574 amino acids and 4904 atoms. 

Can it be that modern 3D graphics software systems are not up to the job of depicting a molecule with hundreds of parts, in a way that suggests that there are hundreds of parts? Not at all. For today's 3D graphics software, it's a breeze to depict something with thousands of parts. What is going on is that academia has settled on visual protein molecule depiction conventions. Such conventions make protein molecules appear vastly simpler than they are.  It's just as if the mainstream was intent on visually fooling us into thinking that protein molecules are vastly simpler than they are. 

We can imagine a way of visually depicting protein molecules that would give us a correct idea about their complexity.  Each type of amino acid would be depicted with a different color. Then there would be a color key at the bottom of each visual, which would tell you which amino acid corresponded to each of the colors. Since there are 20 types of amino acids used by living things, and also roughly 20 colors of the rainbow that a human eye can distinguish, it would be easy enough to depict protein molecules in such a way.  Such a depiction could easily be done given the power of today's 3D graphics. 

But protein molecules are never depicted in such a way. Instead of having realistic visuals that give us the correct idea that protein molecules typically consist of hundreds of amino acids, we are given visuals that leave the average person with the idea that protein molecules have only maybe 5 or 10 or 15 parts. Even without having a more sophisticated type of display that identifies each amino acid in a different color, there is a much simpler way of displaying models of proteins and protein complexes, which would give us correct ideas about the number of parts in such a things. You could have visuals exactly like the visuals that are now used, but with a color-coded legend box in the right corner. The legend box would tell us how many amino acid parts are involved in each of the areas with a particular color. The legend might look something like this:

But we never see such legends in visuals of protein structure. Again and again, we are given protein structure visuals that tend to give someone the impression that protein molecules have only a small number of parts. It is just as if our science authorities were trying to make the casual reader think that protein molecules are vastly simpler than they are.  

A way in which mainstream authorities very frequently mislead us about the complexity of proteins is to refer to amino acids as "building blocks" of proteins or "building blocks of life."  Such a phrase plants in people's minds the extremely erroneous idea that proteins or living things can be created by an unordered assemblage of amino acids, because building blocks such as bricks do not need to be placed in any special order to make something like a wall of a house.  Functional proteins actually require arrangements of amino acids as special and hard-to-randomly-achieve as the arrangement of letters needed to make a functional well-written paragraph.  

A Google image search using the phrase "protein complexity" produces a bunch of images, none of which gives any insight about the complexity of proteins.  A constant feature of Darwinian biology is its underrepresentation and misrepresentation of how high are the organizational requirements for biological function. In countless  different ways Darwinists try to fool us into thinking that incredibly complex and incredibly organized things are simple, or that functions requiring millions or many thousands of well-arranged parts can be achieved by getting an arrangement of only a few parts. Often this involves talking as if small parts of a system give functionality that requires some well-organized system vastly more complicated than such small parts. 

I will now tell you how to get an authoritative answer about how many human protein molecules have more than 2000 well-arranged amino acid parts. Using the UniProt protein database that anyone can use without a login, you go to www.uniprot.org, and type in the following search phrase (or, using less effort, just click on the link below):

(length:[2000 TO 50000]) AND (organism_name:"Homo sapiens")

This gives you a results screen like the one below.

You will see more than 1000 rows in the result set. The results will first show the simplest proteins with more than 2000 amino acids. Click on the Length column header, and the results will be sorted like we see above, with the most complex proteins shown first. 

There seem to be some duplicates in the results, or cases of proteins that are minor variations of the same protein.  But scrolling through the results, you will be able to see two things:

(1) There are at least hundreds of types of proteins in the human body that each have thousands of amino acids.

(2) The most complex proteins in the human body have more than 10,000 well-arranged amino acids. For example, the Titin protein consists of more than 30,000 well-arranged amino acids. 

Using a variation of the search string above, you can get an idea of how many types of human protein molecules have more than 1000 amino acids each. For example, suppose you change the www.uniprot.org search string to be the one below (or just click on the link below):

(length:[1000 TO 50000]) AND (organism_name:"Homo sapiens")

You will get a result set of more than 8000 rows. Allowing for many duplicates, we can assume that human bodies contain more than 1000 types of "highest complexity" protein molecules, where "highest complexity" means having more than 1000 amino acids. 

The facts about protein molecule complexity are these:

• The human body uses many than 20,000 types of protein molecules, most requiring hundreds of well-arranged amino acids. 
• The average human protein molecule has roughly 500 amino acids. Human cells are eukaryotic cells, and according to the scientific paper here, "Eukaryotic proteins have an average size of 472" amino acids. 
• More than 1000 types of human protein molecules consist of more than 1000 amino acids each.
• Hundreds of types of human protein molecules consist of more  than 2000 amino acids. 
• It is misleading to call amino acids "building blocks of proteins," because unlike building blocks which can be added in any order to make a wall of a building, new types of functional proteins require special arrangements of amino acids in very specific sequences.  A non-misleading analogy is to compare a type of protein molecule to an essay, chapter or computer program, and to compare the protein molecule's amino acids to the special sequence of letters used to make such an essay, chapter or computer program,
• DNA and its genes (the same as the genome) merely specify which amino acids are in particular proteins.  To be functional, protein molecules must be folded in very specific ways to make a 3D shape. It is unknown how such 3D shapes arise from mere sequences or chains of amino acids. This is known as the protein folding problem, and is still unsolved.  Progress with software such as AlphaFold is not progress in solving the protein folding problem, but merely progress in a different problem called the protein folding prediction problem.  
• A cell holds an average of something like 40 million protein molecules (not to be confused with 40 million types of protein molecules).  Protein molecules must be arranged in very special ways in a cell for the cell to be functional.  A cell is not at all some disordered bag of protein molecules.  Protein molecules are arranged into teams called protein complexes; special arrangements of such teams can make larger structures called organelles; and a cell may require thousands of well-arranged organelles physically arranged in the right way for the cell to function properly. 
• DNA does not specify which proteins make up protein complexes, nor does it specify how organelles form, nor does it specify the structure of any cell. 
• Darwin knew nothing about the complexity of protein molecules, and did nothing to explain them. Claiming that Darwin explained protein molecules is like claiming that Plato explained smartphones or that Aristotle explained television. 
• Scientists have attempted to strip microbes down to the smallest level in which they can still reproduce, and find that even when microbes are reduced to their smallest complexity, they still require several hundred different types of proteins, most requiring hundreds of well-arranged amino acids. 
• Within the possibility space of all possible amino acid arrangements, functional protein molecules are as rare as functional architectural instructions within the space of all possible letter combinations. 
• Evolutionary biologists lack any credible explanation for how we get so many protein molecules that are so vastly unlikely to appear through unguided processes. As four Harvard scientists stated in a scientific paper, "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown." 

Number of letters in the English alphabet	Number of different types of amino acids used in proteins
26	20
How many well-arranged letters do you need to make a useful paragraph?	How many well-arranged amino acids do you need to make a useful protein?
About 500	About 500
How many different paragraphs (each with a different function) do you need to make a long book?	How many different types of proteins (each with a different function) do you need to make an adult human body?
About 2000	About 20,000
How many well-arranged letter parts do you need to make a long book?	How many well-arranged amino acids do you need to make a human body?
About 1,000,000	Very many times more than 10,000,000 (20,000 times 500), because 10,000,000 is merely the number we get when ignoring duplicate protein molecules of the same type, which have to be very specifically arranged in just the right way for the body to work. The requirement for multiple copies of the same protein type to be well-arranged causes an exponential increase in the total arrangement requirements.