Why These Amino Acids? - The Chemistry of Optimized Design

Back last year I wrote two blogs that included information about the Amino Acids and the property of "handedness" or Chirality. Well recently at Reasons to Believe there was an article about why a set of only 20 specific amino acids comprise all the proteins found in every organism on Earth. The article highlights a study from the University of Hawaii looking at this very question and others. A few highlights from the article are included below. Click this link to see the original article.

The set of 20 amino acids used in biology is universal, yet hundreds of amino acids exist in nature. Biochemists want to know why this specific set of 20 amino acids, and not the others, occurs in proteins.

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Optimal Amino Acids are
An Example of Intelligent Design

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The article attempts to answer this question as well as these other related questions for biochemists:

• Why are proteins built from amino acids? And not the chemically simpler hydroxy acids?
• Why are the amino acids in proteins all α-amino acids? Why not β- or γ- or δ-amino acids?
• Why do all the amino acids in proteins have an α-hydrogen?
• Why are there no N-alkyl amino acids in proteins?

This work from the University of Hawaii indicates that the set of amino acids used to make proteins is the optimal set. This discovery provides new evidence that life’s chemistry stems from the work of a Creator.

Evolutionary biologists argue that the undirected processes of chemical and natural selection generated the set amino acids used to make proteins. If this is the case, some level of optimization would be expected, but not the extreme optimization just discovered by the University of Hawaii researchers. 

The widespread expectation is that evolutionary mechanisms should produce systems that work “just good enough” for the organism to survive, but are not necessarily as optimized as the set of 20 protein-forming amino acids.

As an alternative explanation for the optimized set of amino acids found in proteins, I propose the work of a Creator. Optimization is an indicator of intelligent design, achieved through foresight and preplanning. It requires inordinate attention to detail and careful craftsmanship. By analogy, the optimized biochemistry, epitomized by the amino acid set that makes up proteins, could be rationally understood as the work of a Creator. 

Excerpts from Reasons to Believe, Why These 20 Amino Acids?, Fazale “Fuz” Rana, PhD, March 12th, 2012.

Job 36:3 (NLT) - "I will present profound arguments for the righteousness of my Creator."