Prelude to Information — Evolution’s Elephant in the Living Room

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GOD SAID, Romans 1:18-25:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;

19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath showed it unto them.

20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:

25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

MAN SAID:  According to evolutionist Richard Dawkins: "The DNA of a camel was once in the sea, but it hasn’t been there for a good 300 million years."

Unless otherwise noted, most of the research done for this article was taken from German scientist Dr. Werner Gitt’s book, In the Beginning was Information.

Now THE RECORD. The "Man Said" quote above from the atheist Richard Dawkins is in reference to the idea that chemicals from an unknown source, randomly swirling around in the oceans, and given eons of time and chance, created the DNA code information and did it in such a highly complex animal as the camel. Unfortunately for Dawkins, information doesn’t come about that easily. As an aside, I’m reminded of a joke in Reader’s Digest: A man challenged God. The man said, "Creation is not such a big deal. Even I could do it." God told the man to demonstrate. The man continued, "I’ll just take a little water and a little dirt..." God interrupted and told the man to get his own dirt. Mr. Dawkins, get your own ocean.

Much study has been done in recent years in the area of information science. Creationists and evolutionists alike believe information to be the strongest argument against the theory of evolution. At the very time of this two-part series on information, ICR announced powerful news in a March 2007 release that again has the arguments of the anti-God group headed for the tall grass. A research undertaking at ICR, dubbed the GENE Program, conducted its second annual meeting in January of 2007. Part of the project’s report follows:

This team is developing compelling evidence that neo-Darwinian theory is not only wrong, but can be conclusively demonstrated to be wrong. At the heart of the Darwinian theory of evolution is the concept that mutations plus natural selection can create and expand genetic information. The theory team has developed a computer program which clearly proves just the opposite—mutation plus selection result in net loss of information and continuous genetic degeneration. Several researchers, including Drs. Baumgardner, Brewer, and ReMine, gave progress reports on this research. The first results of this work should become available sometime in 2007. [End of quote]

In a video interview, Richard Dawkins said:

"I suppose the great mystery of life is to explain where the complexity of life came from; in other words, talking about complexity is to say information." [Emphasis added.]

The dictionary defines information as: "knowledge acquired through study or experience or instruction." According to Dr. Gitt, information that is put into a coded form (for constructive purposes, such as the DNA building code), operates by a certain set of laws which it always follows and from which it is observed never to deviate. One of those laws is that coded information is always based on the will of a sender who issues the information, and it only arises through an intentional act conceived from the mind of someone.

In the field of science, something is considered a law only when it has sustained repeated and unfailing scientific experiments over many years. A few examples in nature would be the law of gravity, Newton’s laws, and the laws of thermodynamics. The "law of information" can then be considered a law because, after many years of scrutiny, no observed scientific experiment has ever been done where coded information has ever risen without a mental origin—in history or nature. Therefore, if we accept and use natural laws, like gravity, as starting points of certainty in scientific experiments because of the law’s unwavering stand to scientific scrutiny, then we must also accept the natural laws of information.

To clarify that the "law of information," as Dr. Gitt explains, is without exception, we will first provide some guidelines as to what qualifies as information and what does not. The self-contained design and construction information we are describing only pertains to information that has been put into a coding system, and does not include information gained directly by seeing or measuring, such as information at a crime scene, or information we get from the stars by viewing them through a telescope. Dr. Gitt explains that a set of symbols (or afore agreed-upon code) is required for the representation of information at the syntax level. (Syntax is simply a set of rules for the correct arrangement of words or symbols in a given code.) To demonstrate this, we could use Egyptian hieroglyphics as an example. For fifteen centuries, the secret of the hieroglyphics remained a mystery, because no meaning could be assigned to them. Since nobody living could translate the symbols, it was possible that they didn’t represent any information at all and that the Egyptians just liked to decorate their walls and monuments with symbols. However, this situation changed in 1799 when one of Napoleon’s men discovered a piece of black basalt near the town of Rosetta. The stone came to be known as the "Rosetta Stone." It contains inscriptions in three languages: 54 lines of Greek, 32 lines of Demotic script, and 14 lines of Egyptian hieroglyphics. After studying the stone, it became instrumental in finally decoding the hieroglyphics. Because the meaning of the text was discovered, it was established that the hieroglyphics represented information.

For something to qualify as a code, it must first follow some necessary conditions. The following four conditions are taken from page 62 of Dr. Gitt’s book:

1. A uniquely defined set of symbols must be used (e.g. A, B, C, D).

2. The sequence of the symbols must be irregular. For instance, simply repeating one letter would not be part of a legible code.

3. The symbols must appear in clearly distinguishable structures (e.g. rows, columns, blocks, or spirals).

4. At least some symbols must occur repeatedly. For instance, it is quite difficult to construct even a single sentence in English without repeating at least one letter. [End of quote]

Putting information into a coded form takes a mental process. So we know that if we find encoded information, it took a mental source to encode it. A code must follow a certain set of characteristics to make it easy to understand and to interpret the information.

Since we have successfully formulated information in such a way that it is as valid as the other laws of nature, then it would pertain to every facet of information, including the coded information found in our DNA. Since we have determined scientifically that coded information doesn’t arise without an intelligent designer, then we can conclude scientifically that the coded information in our DNA could not possibly have risen without a mental source.

It must be emphasized just how awesome the information contained in our DNA is. The following article, taken from the Answers In Genesis website, gives us an idea of how ingenious our DNA really is. The article is titled, "DNA: marvelous messages or mostly mess?"

DNA is by far the most compact information storage system in the universe. Even the simplest known living organism has 482 protein-coding genes. This is a total of 580,000 ‘letters,’—humans have three billion in every nucleus.

The amount of information that could be stored in a pinhead’s volume of DNA is equivalent to a pile of paperback books 500 times as high as the distance from Earth to the moon, each with a different, yet specific content. Putting it another way, while we think that our new 40 gigabyte hard drives are advanced technology, a pinhead of DNA could hold 100 million times more information. [End of quote]

Not only is the amount of information contained in our DNA amazing, but it also employs ingenious coding concepts. Our DNA uses a four-letter alphabet to store its information: A, C, G, and T.  These letters represent four chemicals: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. These four chemicals are put into a specific three-letter word sequence in our DNA to specify a particular amino acid. When amino acids are put into a specific sequence and shape, they form proteins. Living cells use 20 different amino acids to encode proteins. As it turns out, a four-letter alphabet is a perfect code for the representation of the 20 different amino acids. According to Dr. Gitt, if the alphabet is too long, the more complex the implementing mechanisms would need to be, the more material for storage would be required, and the more incidents of copying errors would increase. On the other hand, if the alphabet is too short, the words would either be too long or it would take too many words to specify a particular amino acid. After performing some mathematical calculations, Dr. Gitt demonstrates that the four-letter alphabet and three-letter-per-word code system that is used by the DNA of all living beings is the most optimal, from an engineering standpoint. A four-letter alphabet is exactly the right one to use. This further certifies the case for a purposeful design rather than blind chance—in other words, a mental source.

During the 1950s and 60s, discoveries forced scientists to explain how protein structures could have evolved. Dean Kenyon, along with co-author Gary Steinman, literally wrote the book on chemical evolution. Kenyon theorized that life was biochemically predestined to form. According to Kenyon, amino acids just naturally want to form together in specific sequences to form specific proteins. Over the next 20 years, his book Biochemical Predestination became a best-seller on the topic of chemical evolution. He was considered to be one of the world’s leading chemical evolutionists. However, five years after publishing the book, Kenyon began to have doubt as to whether his theory was actually plausible.

Kenyon had to explain how the first proteins could have formed without the aid of the genetic information contained within the DNA, which stores specific sequences of amino acids that combine to form proteins. But the more scientists learned about the sequencing of amino acids to form proteins, the more they learned that amino acids cannot self-assemble without preprogrammed genetic information.

Dr. Stephen Meyer, a popular intelligent-design proponent, says in the video, Unlocking the Mystery of Life:

Like other scientists working on the origin of life, Kenyon realized he had two choices: either he had to explain where these genetic assembly instructions came from, or he had to explain how proteins could have formed directly from amino acids without DNA in the primordial oceans. And in the end, he realized he could do neither. [End of quote]

Faced with growing difficulties in his own theory, along with more discoveries about the importance of DNA, Kenyon was forced to re-evaluate his position. As Kenyon said in Unlocking the Mysteries of Life:

It is an enormous problem: how you could get together in one tiny sub-microscopic volume of the primitive ocean, all of the hundreds to different molecular components you would need in order for a self-replicating cycle to be established. And so my doubts about whether amino acids could order themselves into meaningful biological sequences on their own, without pre-existing genetic material being present, just reached for me, I guess, the intellectual breaking-point near the end of the 70s. [End of quote]

To give an idea of how "enormous" the problem is, let’s examine the make-up of a protein. As mentioned earlier, there are 20 different amino acids used to make proteins. These 20 amino acids are arranged in a specific sequence to make up any given protein. It works the same as a written language. In the English alphabet, there are 26 letters that are arranged in specific sequences to make words. If just one letter is out of place or missing, then the word is no longer correct. Amino acids are arranged in long sequences and specific shapes to make proteins, and if just one amino acid is out of place or missing, then the whole strand becomes useless or defective. For instance, yeast proteins have a chain of 466 amino acids. Just as words in the English language are comprised by using the 26 letters of the alphabet, our DNA uses 20 amino acids to make a "word" (protein) that is 466 "letters" (amino acids) long. The yeast protein has to have the 20 different amino acids it uses arranged in exact order for it to function correctly. Can you imagine randomly dropping Scrabble pieces on a table and successfully having them drop in sequential order to form an English word that is 466 letters long without a single mistake? Bizarre, isn’t it?

To demonstrate, let’s imagine that the letter sequence is 17 letters long instead of 466. Let’s pretend that you write 17 English letters in a random sequence from left to right on a sheet of paper. After finishing your sequence, you ask your friend to also write a random sequence for the same letters from left to right. What do you think are the chances of you and your friend randomly lining up these 17 letters in the same order? Mathematically, the chances are 1 IN 355 TRILLION! With odds like this, it becomes quite hard to believe that the random sequencing of amino acids swirling around in the oceans could ever come close to creating a protein. Now, couple this with the fact that many amino acids can’t form together to make a protein, because they are different types (L type and D type, for instance). But even in the impossible event that a protein would form, it still needs thousands of other proteins and parts necessary to perform the functions for just one cell! Evolutionist Sir Fred Hoyle frames the issue clearly:

The notion that...the operating programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order. [End of quote]

Dr. Stephen Meyer, quoted earlier, is presently director and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He is also a professor of the Conceptual Foundations of Science at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He earned his doctorate from Cambridge University where he analyzed scientific and methodological issues in origin-of-life biology. Concerning the information issue, Dr. Meyer added the following:

I think the information revolution taking place in biology is sounding the death knell for Darwinism and chemical evolutionary theories.  [End of quote]

The law of information is by far the most dominant of all laws. Without information, the other laws cannot function, for they simply wouldn’t exist. The amazing information-laden DNA is described in the book of Psalms 139:13-16:

13 For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.

14 I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

15 My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

16 Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.

This passage was given by the Creator who alone would know this secret, thousands of years before science coined the acronym "DNA." This is just another proof that God authored the Scriptures and will hold all men to it at a very soon-coming judgment day. God is the author of all information. He is the God of words. For more information on DNA click onto:

DNA, God’s Holy Book
Evolution is Dead...They Just Forgot to Bury the Corpse
Info Briefs Part Two
Vestigials

When unbelievers in the scientific community are confronted with the mind-boggling impossibility of life without construction grade information—without a mental source—they just put their aggregate heads in the sand and say, "One day we will discover this answer." Or they will be as Professor Dawkins who, when confronted with this conundrum during a video interview, simply went silent.

Romans 1:22:

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

 

GOD SAID, Romans 1:18-25:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;

19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath showed it unto them.

20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:

25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

MAN SAID: According to evolutionist Richard Dawkins: "The DNA of a camel was once in the sea, but it hasn’t been there for a good 300 million years."

Now you have THE RECORD.

(This concludes Part One of this two-part series, for Part Two, please click here.)

References:

Authorized King James Version

Dawkins, R., Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder, 1998, p254

DNA and genetic operation information excerpted from www.wikipedia.org

From a Frog to a Prince: Biological Evidence of Creation, video documentary, Keziah and American Portrait Films

Gitt, W., Dr., In the Beginning Was Information, 1997

Strobel, L., The Case for a Creator, Zondervan 2004, p243

Unlocking the Mystery of Life, video documentary, Illustra Media

"2007 GENE Meeting Report," Institute for Creation Research, 3/07, p5

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