How the Eukaryote Got its Mitochondria

If someone tossed an important part onto their car’s engine, and slammed down the hood, you wouldn’t expect it to work. And if it did work you’d be suspicious. The claim is either absurd or rigged.

The power plant of eukaryote cells is the mitochondria and evolutionists say these marvels first arose when an early pre-eukaryote cell swallowed up a bacteria which then morphed into a mitochondria.

The story may not be as unlikely as it first appears as cells are able to import, one way or another, all kinds of molecular debris. And sometimes the flotsam turns functional.

To be sure turning an early bacteria into the finely-tuned mitochondria, and integrating it within a host cell, does not seem to be an easy task. One way the mitochondria interacts with the cell around it is via its importing of protein machines from the cell’s cytoplasm. But how did its protein importing mechanisms arise?

As evolutionists wrote earlier this year, those importing mechanisms may be been donated from the host cell, or they may have come from within:

How did the process of protein import in mitochondria—which facilitated the evolution of this organelle, and thus, eukaryotic cell evolution—arise? Was the process driven by the ancestral host cell or by the prokaryotic endosymbiont, or by both? … [In the former], to capitalize on energy production by the ancestral endosymbiont, a protein sorting and importing mechanism was necessary to relocate host cell proteins to the endosymbiont.

To capitalize on energy production? Very clever.

Once established [at the outer membrane], host proteins could then gain access to the intermembrane space and the inner membrane in an “outside-to-inside” trajectory of evolution.

More cleverness, but it was all built into previous designs:

In support of this view, some characteristics of host cell proteins appear to have served as “preadaptations” for mitochondrial protein import.

On the other hand, maybe it all happened in the reverse order:

An alternative viewpoint favors an active role of the endosymbiont in establishing key elements of the protein import pathway. We suggest that both the TOM complex in the outer membrane and the transporter in the inner membrane (TIM complex) were derived from ancestral bacterial proteins—that is, proteins originally encoded by the bacterial endosymbiont’s genome. This evolutionary tinkering—constructing a new molecular machine from existing parts—inside the ancestral bacterium is in line with Jacob’s proposition for the evolution of new cellular functions, which states that new pieces of cellular machinery arise ad hoc, often cobbled together from pieces (proteins) already available in other guises.

But here too evolution is ingenious, constructing amazing mechanisms from chewing gum and baling wire.

Who knows, perhaps the eukaryote did obtain its mitochondria by hijacking a bacteria and capitalizing on its ill-gotten gain. But in that case we must believe evolution just happened to create all kinds of parts, not to mention the bacteria and the means for it to be swallowed by the eukaryote, that fortuitously came together to produce the much needed mitochondria.

These various parts and mechanisms would have to have arisen for other reasons. They could not have been selected to form the mitochondria.

Perhaps the chances of the mitochondria evolving were high. Perhaps the brilliant eukaryotic power house is a no-brainer. But if so do not evolutionists think twice about their story? When they claim that the evolution of some marvel is easy, they are just bumping the problem back a few spaces where it is out of sight.