8 - Macromolecules

Living Eternons

1 Life Everywhere
2 Particles
3 Atoms
4 Molecules
5 Emergence
6 Clays
7 Carbon
8 Macromolecules
9 RNA and DNA
10 Viruses
11 Protocells
12 Cells
13 Plants
14 Animals
15 Humans
16 Lamarkism
17 Darwinism
18 Eternism

8 - Macromolecules: Great Chefs

The ways Eternons combine simple ingredients to prepare complex life, sounds like recipes. To illustrate, let us look at the preparation of an amino acid:

To begin, get simple raw atoms: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen in good quantity, plus a pinch of sulfur.

prepare an amino group with two atoms of hydrogen and one of nitrogen. Set aside.
prepare an acid group with one atom of hydrogen, one of carbon, and two of oxygen. Set aside.
for seasoning, prepare R-groups by joining some atoms of your stock. Set aside.

Now, take a clean atom of carbon, with its four empty hooks:

on the first hook, attach an atom of hydrogen.
on the second hook, attach the amino group.
on the third hook, attach the acid group.
on the fourth hook, attach the R-group

Et voila! You have obtained an amino acid, one of the most basic constituent of life on our planet. To make a different one, just change the R-group.

Eternons use no more than twenty different amino acids to assemble the proteins which constitute all the living structures we know. Proteins are long chains counting hundreds or even thousands units of amino acids. These chains are then coiled and folded to form substances as diverse as insulin, hemoglobin, hormones, enzymes, nerves, hair, skin, wool, feathers, silk, bones, muscles, and much, much more.

Living organisms, the fanciest structures created by Eternons, are not the results of random chemical interactions. In the world of molecules, just like in ours, ingredients do not come together by themselves. Someone has to take care of the preparation. Eternons are those great chefs of the universe whose ingenuity is revealed at all stages of their activity. By the choice of carbon as the prime support. By the preference given to a mere twelve elements out of a hundred. By the use of the same twenty amino acids among billions of other possible molecular combinations.

Yet, nowhere is intelligent design more obvious than in the two molecules we are now going to discuss.

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