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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
- 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. |
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