By James M. Rochford

Dean Kenyon and Gary Steinman wrote Biochemical Predestination which sought to answer the origin of life.^[1] In fact, their book was the “bestselling graduate-level text on the origin of life and established Kenyon as a leading researcher in the field.”^[2] In the book, Kenyon and Steinman held that the origin of life was necessary based on the chemical bonding of the amino acids, which formed into proteins and cells.

However, since this book was written, its thesis has been thoroughly refuted. The major problem with their thesis is this: Physical law produces repeatable events, but it doesn’t produce information. Meyer explains,

Kenyon and Steinman had shown that certain amino acids form linkages more readily with some amino acids than with others, new studies showed that these differential affinities do not correlate with actual sequencing patterns in large classes of known proteins.^[3]

The individually weak hydrogen bonds, which in concert hold two complementary copies of the DNA message text together, make replication of the genetic instructions possible. But notice too that there are no chemical bonds between the bases along the longitudinal axis in the center of the helix. Yet it is precisely along this axis of the DNA molecule that the genetic information is stored.^[4]

Explaining DNA’s information-rich sequences by appealing to differential bonding affinities meant that there had to be chemical bonds of differing strength between the different bases along the information-bearing axis of the DNA molecule. Yet, as it turns out, there are no differential bonding affinities there. Indeed, there is not just an absence of differing bonding affinities; there are no bonds at all between the critical information-bearing bases in DNA.^[5]

Origin of life biochemist Bernd-Olaf Küppers explains, “The properties of nucleic acids indicate that all the combinatorially possible nucleotide patterns of a DNA are, from a chemical point of view, equivalent.”^[6] But if the combinations are equal, then why would certain patterns of information emerge?

Since the release of his textbook, professor Kenyon began to doubt his own theory. Today, in fact, Dean Kenyon is a proponent of Intelligent Design—even though he had formerly been one of the leading authorities in the field of life’s origins.