February 2006
Newsbrief
“Intelligent Design” has certainly been in the news
in the United States lately, though only very briefly in the Japanese
media (commenting on the furor in the United States). Most of
you are no doubt aware of the unfair and biased treatment ID has
gotten in the U.S. press, and so naturally what little is reported
here is similarly misrepresented.
Since this topic is of great importance in our witness, particularly
to the intellectual community here in Tsukuba and around Japan,
Tim has been working on a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Intelligent
Design Versus Accidental Origin: The Origin of Information and
the Genetic Code in DNA.” This is a new venture, and to
make good use of this new tool, we’ve purchased a portable
video projector that can take the PowerPoint presentation off
our laptop computer, along with any video/DVD material we want
to add, and project it on a screen. So far, Tim has presented
both the English and Japanese versions twice each and has two
more venues lined up by the middle of February. This looks like
it will be a very useful new skill.
DNA truly is an amazing molecule and is by far the most compact
information storage system in existence. One scientist calculated
the volume that the DNA in one cell would fit into, and then figured
out how much that would all add up to if you put together one
“genome” of every creature that has ever existed in
the history of the earth. Of course, we don’t know the exact
number, but it is something like one billion species of life.
Anyway, this is what he came up with: “One teaspoon of DNA
could hold the design information of all species of life that
have ever existed and still have room to encode every book that
has ever been written!” Of course, in that form, this “teaspoon
of DNA” would be useless gunk, as DNA needs the fantastic
array of molecular machines and structures in a cell to be of
any use.
So, those who pretend that random-chance evolution has the answer
to all of this are left scratching their heads when it comes to
trying to explain where the vast store of complex information
encoded in DNA came from. We, of course, know the answer, and
it is the same answer the Bible has declared all along. “For
you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s
womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made”
(Psalm 139:13-14). Indeed, each life form is “wonderfully
made,” and the more we learn about how the cell actually
works, the more amazing it all gets. It is like a miniature city,
with a complex transportation network and little molecular “trucks”
transporting molecules to exactly where they’re needed (along
with the instructions of what to do).
DNA is so versatile that a “gene” (a particular section
of the long DNA strand) can code for two or even more proteins
at the same time. One bit of information is stored in a “codon,”
which is made up or a triplet set of three “bases,”
of which there are four varieties, labeled A, G, C and T after
their chemical names. Thus there are 64 (4x4x4) codons that encode
all of the information DNA contains. This is similar to a “byte”
on a computer’s hard disc, which is made up of a set of
eight “bits” of either plus or minus (256 combinations
to code with). God has so constructed DNA and encoded the information
in the series of codons that make up a gene that the gene can
be directed to drop out a small section at a particular place
when it transfers the information to “messenger RNA”
so that the series of three bases that make up the “codons”
are shifted over to line up in an almost entirely different set—and
it still makes sense! (I’m not sure that sentence makes
much sense, however, as it’s too complicated to easily explain
in words!) In other words, the two sets of information for the
two different proteins are encoded in the same gene! And sometimes
there is even a third set of information for a third protein!
Tim wrote an article for the local English-language newspaper
describing this amazing property through an analogy. There is
always one particular codon (AUG) that indicates where the gene
sequence starts and one of three codons tell it when the sequence
ends. Imagine if we could encode fairy tales using DNA. “Once
upon a time” would be the start codon and “they lived
happily ever after” would be the end codon. Imagine that
you were able to figure out a genetic code that would enable you
to encode the story of “Snow White” that way. Then
imagine that you were able to remove a base or two from that long
chain of encoding codons so that the triplets making up each codon
were shifted over so that the new set of triplets would make an
entirely different sequence of codons. And now imagine that the
story had turned into that of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty!
That sounds utterly impossible (and no doubt is—at least
in English!), but God has done something similar in DNA. It utterly
boggles the mind to think that such a feat is possible, but God
is so far beyond us that he can design such fantastic complexity
into such a small space. “Such knowledge is too wonderful
for me, too lofty for me to attain. … How precious to me
are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!”
(Psalm 139:6, 17).
We’ll close with a note asking your prayers for Juji as
she undergoes her usual treatment in the hospital. Things are
progressing normally, but we ask you to lift her in your prayers.
Tim Boyle
The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p.
252
|
