Does the DNA Information Code Point to Design?
DNA Double Helix from Wikipedia
I hope this post finds you well!
I started this site with the intention of expressing the reasons I believe in the Christian worldview…and that it’s not an unreasonable or illogical position given the evidence we have to work with…I hope it has been helpful in some way to at least some of you!
We have been discussing design in our universe and in our world…and we’ll be continuing to so so for at least a couple of weeks. Today I want to talk about information theory and the implications when it comes to design vs. random processes.
So I guess we have to start with the question “What is information?”
I’ve recently ‘re-discovered’ an engineer who studied communication engineering, specializing in control systems and communication systems. His name is Perry Marshall and he’s a household name for anyone that uses Google Adwords or ‘Pay Per Click” to advertise on the internet. That’s how I knew of him previously.
Come to find out, he has also done a lot of work in the area of intelligent design, much of it focusing on information theory. His article “If You Can Read This, I Can Prove God Exists: Language, Information, and Naturalism vs. Intelligent Design” goes into a lot more depth on DNA and information. I’ve used the information he provides extensively in this article.
You can also access an audio presentation of his material here. There’s a link to a video as well.
So a simplistic form of the idea is this.:
- DNA is a form of information.
- Production of information requires the input of an intelligent mind.
- Therefore DNA was created with the input of an intelligent mind.
What is Information?
‘The Merriam-Webster online dictionary says that information is: “the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence.”
Information is not a physical entity. It is more than just matter and energy. It’s immaterial, though it is carried by material or physical media. As Perry Marshall says in the aforementioned article, “Information can be stored or transmitted by matter and energy, but information itself is neither matter or energy.” Information involves a message that is imagined, symbolically represented in some way, then delivered somewhere else.
Information is necessary for design.
Pattern vs. Design
Design requires information, patterns do not. Organization alone does not mean information is present. Stalagmites and stalactites forming in caves and unique and beautiful snowflakes, no two ever the same, are good examples of naturally occurring patterns. They were produced by naturally occurring processes…no intelligent design necessary.
So natural processes can produce order.
Can natural processes produce information?
Music is an example of design. It exists in two forms…the written form on the music stand and the vibrations in the air allowing us to hear it as the vibrations physically strike the ear drum.
Design is always characterized by this pathway: plan-symbolization-creation.
Pattern is created by Matter + Energy. There is never an exact copy. It requires no ‘thought’ or intent.
Design, on the other hand, requires information...this is a property of all design. Information consists of Matter + Energy + Will or Intent. In order to have information, someone had to decide to create it. Someone had to think of and write the music. It is possible to produce exact copies of what they wrote. It can be delivered by more than one medium, such as written or verbal media.
Randomly and naturally occurring processes that create snowflakes and tornadoes may create order, but they lack “information” therefore, they lack design.
The issue then becomes…
Basically, DNA is a molecule in a ‘double helix’ structure that divides to multiply, and an appropriate chemical falls into place at every divided spot so it can create an exact replica of itself. You can see a representation of DNA in the animated picture above.
The ’spots’ consist of four chemicals, Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, and Guanine, (or A,T,C, and G) and these chemicals encode all information needed for life.
The simplest organism needs 500,000 of them while a human has about three billion (3,000,000,000)…inside every cell of the body.
With all of the technology man has developed, we have no information storage system that is as dense as the DNA molecule…it hold more information per size than anything that can currently be produced by man…It’s an amazing structure.
DNA and Language
DNA doesn’t just physically store data. It represents much more than itself…it represents a whole living organism.
It has the four characteristics of language… alphabet, grammar, meaning and intent….and it can be copied and stored on other media without losing information.
According to Perry Marshall, it can be likened to the English language in the following way:
- Nucleotide = Character
- Codon = Letter
- Gene = Word
- Operon = Sentence
- Regulon = Paragraph
It also has ‘redundancy‘ or ‘error correction’ capabilities, like most languages do. Miss every second word in a conversation due to poor reception and you can still follow what’s going on because English is ‘redundant’. You don’t need every single specific word to get the message because there is a context to the message that lets you ‘fill in the blanks’. DNA can do the same thing.
One of the properties of language is that it contains and transmits information. By any formal definition of language, DNA is language. The DNA molecule itself is an encoding-decoding system that transmits reproducible information.
There are no examples of information that has been created without intent. Without a conscience mind to give it the dimension of intent or will, there is no information. We have no examples of a code or language coming from anything but a mind…there are no known exceptions.
If information requires intelligence and DNA contains information, then DNA must have required intelligence in it’s formation. It is present in all living things from the smallest single celled organism. There are no better explanations in biology or philosophy as to where the information in the DNA code arose.
Countless biologists and chemists have studied the possibilities of inorganic matter producing life ever since the ideas of evolution were put forth in the 19th century. Today they have yet to come up with a suitable theoretical model, let alone discovered any reliable answers. In some ways, with new discoveries in the conditions they believe were present when life arose (according to the most accepted models in science), they are farther away than they were 25 years ago with this problem.
The problem of the origin of biological life and the existence of physical DNA molecule has been an impossible question to answer. The addition of origin of the information included in DNA only adds another issue to resolve.
Whether you agree or not, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to conclude that an intelligent designer is the best explanation for the creation of our finite universe, and also the best explanation for the creation of organic life, DNA, and the information that it contains.
Read more about this from Perry Marshall’s article “If You Can Read This, I Can Prove God Exists: Language, Information, and Naturalism vs. Intelligent Design” and check out William Dembski’s site called ‘Design Inference‘ for more on intelligent design.
Until next time!
{ 3 trackbacks }
{ 0 comments… add one now }