Monthly Archives: February 2015

The Scarcity of Information

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One of the key points of my book is you need information to build a universe or to build a living creature, and you can’t get information by chance. Darwinists like to claim that, given enough time, anything is possible. Here’s a wonderful analogy that helps to show how wrong that claim is.

You recall that the machine parts of all living creatures are called “proteins,” and that all life uses an “alphabet” of the same 20 amino acids, linked together and folded just right, to assemble proteins. We can compare by analogy the odds of getting a functional protein (a protein that performs one of life’s functions) with the odds of getting a coherent English sentence. A functional protein typically has about 300 amino acids linked together, but let’s look at a much simpler case of only 100 linked amino acids. Let’s compare that to a combination of 100 English letters.

Now if you ask yourself how many English sentences are 100 letters long, you get a very large number. In his 1986 book Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, Michael Denton states that linguists have estimated that number as 1025, or ten trillion trillion. That’s a huge number. Does that mean that, if you combine at random 100 English letters, you are likely to get a coherent sentence? Absolutely not, and that’s what most people don’t recognize! The odds of getting a coherent sentence are less than one in about 10100, or less than one in a number with 100 zeros! Wow! To give you a sense of how unlikely that is, you have a greater chance of picking the correct marked marble out of a pile of marbles as big as the known universe.

We know that every species on Earth has new information (coded by “orphan genes” that have no recognizable ancestor). Human DNA contains at least 54 orphan genes that build proteins used in our brains. These genes are not found in any other species, including any of the great apes. That’s roughly equivalent to 54 new sentences of information. Where did that information come from? Design or chance?

Thanks for reading.

A Granddaughter Is Born

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I’ve gotten a little behind in my blogging, and one reason is the birth of my first grandchild, a girl, on January 28. I was able to see her at the hospital the day she was born, and hold her when she was six days old. It is another level of experience to hold a grandchild in your arms.

But, being me, I can’t help but also analyze it as a miracle of molecular biology. Like all of us, my granddaughter started off as a single cell. I don’t know how many cells are in her body now, but likely many trillions. Estimates vary, but the consensus seems to be that an adult human has about 30 trillion cells. That’s 30,000,000,000,000 cells; or about 100,000 cells for every person in the United States. Her trillions of cells are not identical, they are quite varied, and they are quite interconnected.

One of the many pleasures I’ve had in my journey has been interacting with people at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. I would encourage you to support them; they do a superb job uncovering design in biology and fighting Darwinist nonsense. Once I was able to meet with Ann Gauger, who helped me with my book. Ann is a research scientist who “uses molecular genetics and genomic engineering to study the origin, organization and operation of metabolic pathways.” So she’s very smart, and has done a lot of research into how biological systems are created. Ann told me that they’re finding amazing design in the architecture of how a single cell develops into a member of a particular species. It’s not just DNA coding; rather each species somehow has, built into the design of that first embryo, mechanisms for creating a member of that species. Ann told me that they’ve found that if you tinker just a little with what’s going on, the organism dies. So you have quite different cellular architectures producing different species, and they couldn’t have grown apart in the manner predicted by Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution, because any minor change would doom the organism.

A reader pointed me to a related item in the Encyclopedia Britannica:

During its development the nervous system undergoes remarkable changes to attain its complex organization. In order to produce the estimated 1 trillion neurons present in the mature brain, an average of 2.5 million neurons must be generated per minute during the entire prenatal life. This includes the formation of neuronal circuits comprising 100 trillion synapses, as each potential neuron is ultimately connected with either a selected set of other neurons or specific targets such as sensory endings. Moreover, synaptic connections with other neurons are made at precise locations on the cell membranes of target neurons. The totality of these events is not thought to be the exclusive product of the genetic code, for there are simply not enough genes to account for such complexity.

So each minute, for all of her nine month gestation, an average of 2.5 million neurons were generated in my granddaughter’s brain. This incredible feat is accomplished in part by architecture and design outside of our genes.

Birth is a miracle on many levels.

Thanks for reading.