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Evidence for a Creator: No DNA, No Cell; No Cell, No DNA

We have long known that DNA is critical for life. It carries and preserves the genetic information that makes up an organism. It is essential to the growth and reproduction of life forms because DNA has to be carefully copied for cell division to occur. So cells are dependent on DNA, but it turns out DNA is also dependent on cells or it would quickly break down. It has been learned that DNA is inherently unstable. The complicated interdependent relationship of DNA and cells means that neither could have risen independently of the other.

The Cell’s Role in Preserving DNA

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2015 for their research into DNA. Their findings make it even harder to believe that life came about on it’s own by accident, without any intelligent direction.

Tomas Lindahl demonstrated that DNA decays at such a rate that the development of life on Earth should have been impossible. The Nobel Committee put it this way, “you ought to have been a chemical chaos long before you even developed into a fetus.” So why doesn’t our genetic information break down completely? Only because of the genetic repair systems in the cell. In one mechanism that Lindahl discovered, called base excision repair, an enzyme will detect an error that will break the DNA chain and other enzymes will repair it so that the DNA can replicate properly.

Paul Modrich discovered another molecular mechanism called mismatch repair. As DNA is copied, replication errors happen and Modrich found that enzymes continually detect most of these and other enzymes repair them. The Nobel Committee said this “reduces the error frequency during DNA replication by about a thousandfold.”

The third scientist, Aziz Sancar, found how cells deal with mutations that can damage DNA. Because of radiation, two DNA base pairs might bind to each other incorrectly, but through nucleotide excision repair, enzymes will cut out and replace such damaged DNA strands.

The Implications

As Hugh Henry and Daniel Dyke say, “We have long known that the cell could not reproduce without DNA, but we now know that DNA would self-destruct without the cell. It is this complex symbiotic relationship between a cell and its DNA that makes the modern evolutionary theory more difficult to defend.”

DNA and a cell’s complex ability to monitor and repair it would have had to have come about at the same instant. If random, unguided processes brought them about, they had to bring them both about the same time and had to have anticipated the inherent instability of DNA and built into the cell the variety of enzymes to prevent the self-destruction of DNA.

Personally, it’s too hard for me to believe that these kind of complex things come about on their own, and what’s more, that they come about right at the same time so that such seemingly miraculous advances aren’t immediately lost because they can’t be preserved. Such complex, interdependent systems point to an intelligent creator who knew just what he was building and put it together just as was needed.

Source: Hugh Henry and Daniel Dyke of Reasons to Believe

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Evidence for a Creator: Design Convergences

Evolutionary theory holds that all forms of life on earth today evolved from the first single-celled life form through unguided natural selection. An evolutionary tree has been developed that shows how various species are supposed to have evolved from other species. Species on the same branch of the tree are supposed to have had a common ancestor. So while all species are supposed to  have a common ancestor in the first life form, species on one branch of the tree did not evolve or descend from species on another branch of the tree. Each branch is said to have evolved randomly and independently. So then why is it that unrelated species, that evolved independently, have some of the same features? These common features are known as Design Convergences. Let’s explore the implications of this.

Design Convergences

It can be observed that species unrelated in the evolutionary tree often manifest identical anatomical and physiological features. So if these features were supposed to have come about by random, beneficial, mutations, why do two unrelated species have the same features?

According to the evolutionary tree, bats and flying lemurs didn’t come from the same common ancestor, so why is it that they each have the same limb structure? We’re to believe that the same independent mutations came about randomly, just coincidentally, in different areas of the evolutionary tree?

Naturalists attempt to explain such design convergences as the result of nearly identical environmental, predatory and competitive pressures on unrelated species. So because these unrelated species faced similar challenges to survival, they propose that natural selection shaped these species in identical ways. Now, that might make sense if natural selection was a designing intelligence, but remember it’s mindless and totally unguided.

Here are two problems Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe sees with this. First, given that naturalistic evolution supposedly happened in response to a large number of unpredictable and dissimilar events, design convergence resulting from natural process should be extremely rare, yet design convergence outcomes permeate the fossil record. Second, design convergence appears in species from radically different habitats facing widely diverse survival stresses. Different habitats and survival stresses would imply dissimilar bases for natural selection.

Examples

The chameleon (a reptile) and the sandlance (a fish) are another example. Both have eyes that move independently; when one eye is in motion, the other eye can remain motionless. Both use the cornea rather than the lens of the eye to focus on objects. Both have skin coverings for their eyes that make them less conspicuous to prey and predators. Both have the same kind of tongue and the same kind of tongue-launching mechanism for snagging prey. Yet these creatures exist in drastically distinct habitats and remain far apart on any workable evolutionary chart.

Paleontologist Simon Conway Morris has described dozens of such design convergences at the organism level and Biochemist Fazale Rana offers over a hundred examples at the molecular level. So if we are to believe in evolution by unguided natural selection, we must believe that many identical random mutations all came about independently, just by chance.

The Aliens Look Just Like Us

On a larger scale it would be like if life did evolve on Earth and on another planet somewhere in the galaxy, and when those aliens showed up to visit us, we saw that they looked just like us: same body structure, walking upright, two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears, one nose, one mouth. Life evolved randomly, by chance, against the odds, on two different planets with different environments, and both look the same.

This would help with Sci-Fi movie budgets because the aliens would look just like humans – but if life came about somewhere else by chance, we know they wouldn’t be just like us. Likewise, two unrelated species on earth, evolving by chance in different environments, shouldn’t have such similarities, not unless there was a common intelligent designer behind both.

Common Descent or Common Designer?

Random, unguided mutations aren’t going to produce the same result in different cases. But an intelligent creator might well use some of the same designs and features in different cases. As a computer programmer I reuse good code in different programs all the time when I have a similar need.

Some commonalities we see in the life on earth could be evidence of common descent, but they could also be evidence for a common designer. And then there are these design convergences that are quite a problem for the idea of common descent. So as you think about what we see in all the amazing life around us, which explanation do you think makes the most sense?

Source: More Than a Theory by Hugh Ross

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