Eukaryote

Pastor Chui - Eukaryote Without Mitochondria Is Not a Product of Evolution

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• published: 28 Jun 2016
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The Answers In Genesis website published an article written by Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell on June 2, 2016. I now quote her article below: “Having no mitochondria, this protist is said to have “evolved beyond the known limits that biologists circumscribed.”1 “News Sources “NPR: “Look, Ma! No Mitochondria” “Science Daily: “Change the Textbooks: This Eukaryote Completely Lacks Mitochondria” “Mitochondria are the energy factories that ordinarily generate most of the energy in nucleated (eukaryotic) cells. Bacteria have neither nuclei nor mitochondria, but textbooks say that all eukaryotic cells have mitochondria or some degenerate form of them. “Now hiding in the low oxygen environment of a pet chinchilla’s gut, scientists have found a unicellular protist that doesn’t. (A protist is a eukaryotic microorganism; neither a plant, animal, or fungus, a protist can be unicellular or colonial.) Named Monocercomonoides, this unusual microorganism doesn’t have the slightest trace of mitochondria. How does it survive? And does its existence lend support to evolutionary notions about the origin of the eukaryotic cells that make up all multicellular organisms? As to their need for iron-sulfur clusters, Monocercomonoides meets this need using not one but four proteins with biochemical structures like those used by bacteria, archaea, and plastids during the first few steps of iron-sulfur cluster synthesis.24 However the genes that encode these proteins are structurally the sort of genes found in eukaryotes. And similar iron-sulfur assembly systems have been found in two other eukaryotes that get along with abbreviated sorts of mitochondria-like organelles. “These four proteins lack any sort of markers suggesting they ever were part of a mitochondrial system.26 Thus they appear most consistent with an original design for cytoplasmic, iron-sulfur cluster production in a non-mitochondrial protist. Designs demand a designer, and the written record of our origins, God’s Word, lets us know that the Designer is the Creator God of the Bible. “The Limits of Evolution and Biology “The claim that this protist has “evolved beyond the known limits that biologists circumscribed” is ironic. Molecules-to-man evolution—by supposing that life can emerge from non-living raw materials through random chance processes—presumes that which goes beyond anything observational science supports. Furthermore, by supposing that mutations can provide the genetic information to evolve into different, more complex kinds of organisms, molecules-to-man evolution presumes the rampant occurrence of something biologists have never observed. The notion that all life shares a single ancestor is a tale told without the benefit of experimental mechanisms to show that such a scenario could happen. The popular endosymbiosis theory to explain the origin of all eukaryotes likewise fails to stand up to scrutiny. “Evolutionary biologists choose to draw the line on the limits of evolution not on the basis of observational science, but rather according to whatever suits their evolutionary presumptions. This protist is an observable surprise that will require textbooks to be updated, but it isn’t the protist that pushes the limits of what is actually known in biology: it is the whole story of molecules-to-man evolution!” Thank God for the contribution of Dr. Mitchell.