Don Batten interviews professional scientist Dr Royal Truman as reported in Creation Magazine, Volume 46. Issue 3, 2024

Royal Truman has bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and computer science from State University New York, Buffalo, an MBA from the University of Michigan, a PhD in organic chemistry from Michigan State University, plus post-doctoral studies in bioinformatics from the universities of Heidelberg and Mannheim, Germany. He has many professional certifications in such fields as cyber security, supply chain logistics, cloud technology, and project management. He has worked for 40 years for the largest chemical company in the world.

Royal is married to Petra, who worked as a lawyer, and later as a full-time homemaker. They have two grown sons; one has a law degree and the other is working on a PhD in computer science. Raised by missionary parents in Chile, training in North America, and then working in Germany, Dr Truman speaks five languages. He also plays multiple musical instruments and is very artistic (oil and acrylic painting, drawings, ink, and watercolour). He says his home looks like a museum. He trained in several forms of martial arts, attaining a brown belt in a North Korean style of Taekwondo. There is a lake in front of their house in Germany where Royal swims year-round (ice swimming!). He is one interesting guy!

Dr Truman shared, throughout my career, I worked with very clever and conscientious scientists who accepted evolution as a given, although this was not related to their own scientific training. But nothing I learned about evolution made any sense based on my own areas of expertise. But how could such clever people all be wrong? What was I overlooking? To find out, Royal devoted more than 35 years to learning all he could about molecular biology and systems biology. This is the chemistry of the machinery of life (proteins, nucleic acids, etc.). This included taking formal courses in bioinformatics. Such training assisted in analyzing the vast amounts of complex data involved—for example, the human DNA has over 3 billion ‘letters’. Even a relatively simple protein requires hundreds of DNA letters that specify how to make it.

First, Dr Truman had to understand the biological reality that needs explaining. What is it about the simplest living things that needs to be explained? For example, all self-reproducing (‘living’) cells have a set of very complex chemical units called tRNAs (‘transfer RNAs’). There must be at least one unique tRNA for each of the ~20 amino acids that make up proteins.

These tRNAs are essential for the manufacture of all proteins since the cell’s machinery uses them to interpret from the DNA code which amino acid is to be used at each position of a protein. But these are just a small component of the genetic equipment needed! Dr Truman researched the biochemical source of tRNAs and noted that their manufacture was coded for on DNA and they must be extracted by special proteins. But these proteins could only exist if functional tRNAs were already available to help decode instructions for their manufacture. He concluded that tRNAs and proteins could never arise by any natural (evolutionary) process.

Irreducible complexity describes biological systems with multiple interacting parts that would not function if any one of the parts was removed. Dr Truman discovered many examples of ‘irreducible complexity’. These include dozens of ‘molecular machines’, such as polymerases, helicases, isomerases, ribosomes, and ATP synthase. Each of these is a stupendously complex and efficient ‘nano-machine’, f lawlessly repeating indispensable services over and over. But not only is each one irreducibly complex, all these, and much more, must be present together for cells to function, to reproduce. Dr Truman comments, “How are all these multiple irreducibly complex components to come together without a Planner?”

Royal discovered that cells share properties with computers—he published two papers on this. ^{Display footnote number:2} He is uniquely qualified to understand this, having been responsible for several years to identify all new computing technologies (hardware and software) which could someday be applicable to the chemical industry. This underlined again how cells are designed; they could not have come about by a natural (evolutionary) process.

Dr Truman shares how “I quickly discovered that evolutionary explanations were only vague imaginings; there was nothing solid enough to research, and the speculative narratives were easy to disprove.”

The origin of life?

Being a chemist, it was almost inevitable that Royal should examine origin of life (OoL) publications. He read hundreds of chemical publications that tried to explain the OoL and concluded that “all were nothing but wishful thinking.”

For example, thousands of complex proteins are needed for cells to work. However, not one of even the simplest proteins could be created naturally. Some of the problems he noted are: 1. Racemization, 2. Side-chain reactions, 3. Reactions with other chemicals, 4. Wrong proportions of biologically relevant amino acids, 5. Obtaining long chains in water,

If simply obtaining a long, linear random amino acid polymer (i.e., a ‘protein’) isn’t possible, how in the world were thousands of different proteins, each having the correct sequence of amino acids, supposed to have arisen? Natural selection can’t operate until you already have something that makes copies of itself.

According to Dr Truman: Origin of Life research is spinning its wheels. Experiments are designed with a specific goal in mind and the laboratory setup is never plausible; it never mimics something feasible in nature. When chemists such as I evaluate the results, we find them to be inconsistent with the claim that life made itself by natural processes.

Royal noted that there is no feasible path from simple chemicals obtained naturally to a biological cell controlled by DNA-encoded information.

Instead, there is an assumption that ‘life’ can be defined as any process involving some form of chemical replication and then with enough time a cell must inevitably arise. This has nothing to do with science; is it pure speculation with no mechanistic basis.

I have concluded that no chemist ever became an evolutionist because this is what the data showed them. Instead, clever people decided to believe in evolution, and then went about cherry-picking the data to support this notion and ignoring what is inconvenient.