33. Genetic Information
a . Carl Sagan showed, using simple calculations, why one cell’s worth of genetic information approximates 4,000 books of printed information. Each of Sagan’s 4,000 books had 500 pages with 300 words per page. [See Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 25.]
Each book would have a volume of about 50 cubic inches. An adult human’s body contains about 30 trillion (3 × 1013) cells. [See R. Sender et al., Nature, Vol. 529, 14 January 2016, p. 132.] About 800 cubic miles have been eroded from the Grand Canyon. Therefore, if the DNA in every cell in one person’s body were reduced to 4,000 books, they would fill the Grand Canyon 30 times
The Moon is 240,000 miles from Earth. If the DNA in a human cell were stretched out and connected, it would be 7 feet long. If all the DNA in one person’s body were placed end-to-end, it would extend to the Moon 165,000 times.
The DNA in a human cell weighs 6.4 × 10-12 grams. [See Monroe W. Strickberger, Genetics, 2nd edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1976), p. 54.] Probably less than 50 billion people have lived on Earth. If so, one copy of the DNA of every human who ever lived—enough to define the physical characteristics of all those people in microscopic detail—would weigh only
6.4 × 10-12 × 50 × 109 = 0.32 grams
This is less than the weight of one aspirin.
b . These letters, called bases, are of four types—abbreviated A, C, G, and T. They are frequently shown as the rungs on a twisted ladder—the ladder representing the DNA molecule.
c . Johan H. Gibcus et al., “A Pathway for Mitotic Chromosome Formation,” Science, Vol. 359, 9 February 2018, p. 652.
d . Cees Dekker, “DNA Looper Caught on Film,” Science, Vol. 555, 1 March 2018, p. 9.
e . “What is actually powering the loop formation, he adds, ‘has got to be the biggest problem in genome biology right now.” Kim Nasmyth, as quoted by Elie Dolgin, in “A Loop of Faith,” Nature, Vol. 544, 20 April, 2017, p. 285.
u Siyuan Wang et al., “Spatial Organization of Chromatin Domains and Compartments in Single Chromosomes,” Science, Vol. 353, pp. 598–602.
f . “... the human genome is over 2 m in length and yet it is packed into a cellular compartment that is merely about 10 m m in diameter.” Daniel R. Larson and Tom Misteli, “The Genome—Seeing it Clearly Now,” Science, Vol. 357, 28 July 2017, p. 354.
g . “Biochemical systems are exceedingly complex, so much so that the chance of their being formed through random shufflings of simple organic molecules is exceedingly minute, to a point indeed where it is insensibly different from zero.” Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, p. 3.
“No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole observable universe is not large enough to contain the necessary monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly the waste paper baskets required for the deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living material.” Ibid., p. 148.
Not mentioned by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe is the simple fact that even a few correct words typed by the hordes of monkeys would decay long before a complete sentence of Shakespeare was completed. Correspondingly, a few correct sequences of amino acids would decay long before a protein was completed, not to mention the thousands of proteins that must be in their proper place to have a living cell. Finally, the most complex requirement of all is the presence of functioning DNA.
“From the beginning of this book we have emphasized the enormous information content of even the simplest living systems. The information cannot in our view be generated by what are often called ‘natural’ processes, as for instance through meteorological and chemical processes occurring at the surface of a lifeless planet. As well as a suitable physical and chemical environment, a large initial store of information was also needed. We have argued that the requisite information came from an ‘intelligence’, the beckoning spectre.” Ibid., p. 150.
“Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make the random concept absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favourable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate.” Ibid., p. 141.
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe also say that our own intelligences must reflect a vastly superior intelligence, “even to the extreme idealized limit of God.” They believe that life was created by some intelligence somewhere in outer space and later was transported to Earth. [emphasis in original] Ibid., p. 144.
h . Murray Eden, as reported in “Heresy in the Halls of Biology: Mathematicians Question Darwinism,” Scientific Research, November 1967, p. 64.
u “It is our contention that if ‘random’ is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.” Murray Eden, “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory,” Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, editors Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, June 1967, p. 109.
i . “The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10 20) 2,000 = 10 40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth [by chance or natural processes], this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court.” Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, p. 24.
“Any theory with a probability of being correct that is larger than one part in 10 40,000 must be judged superior to random shuffling [of evolution]. The theory that life was assembled by an intelligence has, we believe, a probability vastly higher than one part in 10 40,000 of being the correct explanation of the many curious facts discussed in preceding chapters. Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.” Ibid., p. 130.
After explaining the above to a scientific symposium, Hoyle said that evolution was comparable with the chance that “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.” Fred Hoyle, “Hoyle on Evolution,” Nature, Vol. 294, 12 November 1981, p. 105.
u “All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase it.” Lee Spetner, Not by Chance (Brooklyn, New York: The Judaica Press, Inc., 1996), p. 138.
j . See Susuma Ohno, “So Much ‘Junk’ DNA in Our Genome,” The Brookhaven Symposium on Biology, Vol. 23, 1972, pp. 366–370.
Ohno’s catchy term “junk DNA” stuck and no doubt discouraged a generation of researchers from studying the vast amount of important “junk” DNA that did not code for proteins. (Who wants to study junk?) This is one example of the harm that evolution thinking has done to science. Nevertheless, the thrust of Ohno’s paper made an insightful point: If all the DNA “of man, mice, and other organisms” was useful, so many mutations would accumulate in hundreds of millions of years that those species would become extinct. What Ohno overlooked is that life has not been on Earth for hundreds of millions of years. Belief in the supposedly old age of the Earth has also been harmful to science.
u Non-coding DNA differs more among different species than does protein coding DNA. Had the non-coding DNA received equal attention since 1972, the great dissimilarity between species would have been more apparent.
“So whereas if you find a particular protein-coding gene in a human, you’re going to find nearly the same gene in a mouse most of the time, and that rule just doesn’t work for regulatory elements [non-coding DNA].” [See Ewan Birney, “Journey to the Genetic Interior,” Scientific American, Vol. 307, October 2012, p. 82.]
k . “The failure to recognize the importance of introns [so-called junk DNA] may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.” John S. Mattick, as quoted by W. Wayt Gibbs, “The Unseen Genome: Gems among the Junk,” Scientific American, Vol. 289, November 2003, pp. 49–50.
“What was damned as junk because it was not understood may, in fact, turn out to be the very basis of human complexity.” Ibid., p. 52.
u “Noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) [so-called junk RNA] have been found to have roles in a great variety of processes, including transcription regulation, chromosome replication, RNA processing and modification, messenger RNA stability and translation, and even protein degradation and translocation. Recent studies indicate that ncRNAs are far more abundant and important than initially imagined.” Gisela Storz, “An Expanding Universe of Noncoding RNAs,” Science, Vol. 296, 17 May 2002, p. 1260.
u “The term ‘junk DNA’ is a reflection of our ignorance.” Gretchen Vogel, “Why Sequence the Junk?” Science, Vol. 291, 16 February 2001, p. 1184.
u “... non-gene sequences [what evolutionists called ‘junk DNA’] have regulatory roles.” John M. Greally, “Encyclopaedia of Humble DNA,” Nature, Vol. 447, 14 June 2007, p. 782.
l . Brendan Maher, “The Human Encyclopedia,” Nature, Vol. 489, 6 September 2012, pp. 46–48.
This issue of Nature contains six of the 30 papers explaining the discoveries of the ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) project, conducted by more than 500 international scientists beginning in 2003. Their discoveries will revolutionize our understanding of the vast complexity of the human genome. The other papers are published in Genome Research and Genome Biology.
u Gary Taubes, “RNA Revolution,” Discover, October 2009, pp. 47–52.