DNA is DIGITAL INFORMATION

By Lucien LeSage

Some may not see much of a point to write an article on this subject, but with evolution being taught in our schools it seems like it would be a good idea to be able to question the foundation of that belief. What happens when your children come home from school or college and say there is scientific proof for evolution and the Biblical idea that God created man is nothing but a myth? How can you respond in a logical way and show that the foundation of such a materialistic belief is flawed. Dr. Stephen Meyer wrote a more that 600 page book on the subject.

I have worked on computers my whole adult life from 1972 untill retirement in 2017.
In the early years we troubleshot large mainframe computers down to a component such as a flip-flop.
Most computers are digital machines. They store data in a digital format and the instructions that they execute are stored in a digital format.

So why do I bring that up in an article about DNA? Well as we progress in our thoughts here you will clearly see why. While I have worked with computers my entire life and went to many schools on mainframe processors with my company, my only understanding of molecular biology is what I have read and researched. You do not need to understand all the intricate workings of molecular biology to understand what an informational system consists of. This is what I hope to articulate in this simple article.

If you are not familiar with how digital computers work then I propose to ask you a simple question. Do you know what it means to store information in a digital format? Let me explain.
Well, first off, you will need to develop a coding system before you can even begin to build a machine to do what computers do and how they store digital information. The word "digital" is very important in what I am trying to explain as you will see.

The most popular coding system is ASCII and was developed by the human mind and the information is stored as bits which is the smallest piece of information and this is what a binary computer uses and there is a reason for this since we are dealing with electronic circuits. In ASCII a byte is represented by 8 bits of data. Stay with me as it's not complicated as you will see.

Think of it this way. You can turn an electric light ON or Off. Let's make On equivalent to 1 and Off is equal to 0. This is no problem for computer circuits. An electronic flip-flop can be set or reset, on or off, 1 or 0.
As a demonstration let us take 8 light bulbs, since ASCII code consists of 8 bits per byte, and each of these light bulbs will have its own switch to turn them on or off. So, you can turn none on or all on or any combination you want.
So let us arrange these 8 lights in a row for this demonstration from left to right.
Now we with our mind need to develop our own coding system and it can be what ever you decide just so long anyone reading it knows the code.
But lets use ASCII in our demonstration since it is what most computers and data communications use.

In our demonstration we are going to arrange lights on and off in a row of 8. Lets substitute on with a 1 and off with a 0 to make it easier. So 1 means the light is on and 0 the light is turned off.
In ASCII the letter "A" is: 0,1,0,0,0,0,0,1
B = 0,1,0,0,0,0,1,0
C = 0,1,0,0,0,0,1,1
D = 0,1,0,0,0,1,0,0
E = 0,1,0,0,0,1,0,1 and so on.

So I can turn a set of 8 lights on to represent 1 of 256 possibilities (binary 00000000 to 11111111).

I could tell you OK those 8 lights are the first letter and to write it down using the code chart. Now I am going to turn the 8 lights on and off for the next letter and you use the code chart to write the next letter down and so forth. This is essentially what a computer does but at speeds that do things more than a billion times in one second.

Can you see what is going on in storing and reading information?

With 8 bits of information there are 256 possibilities as already pointed out. That is more than enough to cover the alphabet and numbers and all the special characters that we use. The instructions that computers execute to perform their work and do math and manipulate data are stored in this manner as well. So the code is used for more that just storing letters and numbers that we would use in everyday life. In fact all the letters and numbers in this article are stored in this exact manner.

So I could write the entire Bible with 0's and 1's using this coding system and in fact that is exactly how it is stored on your hard drive.

So what does this have to do with DNA, you ask?

As you can see in the above method that we have explained it would be impossible for it to have ever come into existence without a MIND involved. A mind would have to invent the coding system and all the hardware to interpret and execute the code.

I could actually use the above method to store information using flowers. I mention flowers only because that is something we can find in nature. I could let a red flower be a 1 and a yellow flower be a 0 and arrange flowers in a row of 8 and then another row for the next letter and easily write a sentence. Now to store the whole Bible with flowers would be quite a chore. I only brought that up to show that a coding system doesn't have to be electronic. With modern computers they store millions, yea trillions of bits (1s and 0s) inside of one memory chip. Now, what if I used certain molecules instead of flowers? Molecules instead of an electronic flip-flop. Molecules which are composed of atoms are very small stuff!

Now Back to DNA.

It turns out DNA is stored in the exact same way. But instead of electrical circuits being on or off, DNA uses 4 different molecules (the four types of nitrogen bases are adenine, thymine , guanine and cytosine) and instead of 8 in a row it samples every 3 molecules in the DNA sequence chain for a code (But each one can be one of four possibilities). So with 3 DNA molecules you have 4x4x4=64 possibilities. It is not a binary coding system as in a modern computer yet it is a coding system non the less and in that respect "so digital like." So DNA is stored in a chain using this coding system of 4 different possible molecules and the decoder protein looks at every 3 in the chain at once for the code (just as we looked at 8 bits in a computer for a code) and then the decoder protein looks at the next 3 for a code, and then the next 3, and then the next 3, etc. But the coding system had to be set up by a mind just as my example with a computer above. And what does this code represent? Here is where it blows the mind. Well it is the code for a certain amino acid which is assembled onto a protein polymer (long chain of molecules) linked with the carbon atom. Then the next amino acid which is determined from the next code is then assembled on this chain until a stop code is reached in the DNA sequence. At that point the protein has been assembled and is complete. Now get this. It is the ORDER in which the amino acids were assembled that determines what the protein does. Wow! Can you see how deep this is getting! It blows the mind. It is a complete study in how the different amino acids and the particular sequence they are in causes the protein to do what it does. To quote Stephen Meyer, "To form a protein, amino acids must link together to form a chain. Yet amino acids form functioning proteins only when they adopt very specific sequential arrangements, rather like properly sequenced letters in an English sentence. Thus, amino acids alone do not make proteins, any more than letters alone make words, sentences, or poetry. In both cases, the sequencing of the constituent parts determines the function (or lack of function) of the whole. Explaining the origin of the specific sequencing of proteins (and DNA) lies at the heart of the current crisis in materialistic evolutionary thinking".

Even Bill Gates says DNA is more advanced than any software ever created. Richard Dawkins, a devout atheist, notes, "Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular-biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer-engineering journal." (Quoted by Meyer and taken from Dawkin's book, "River Out of Eden", pg. 17).

The point of all of what I have written is to show that DNA is a digital code and the fact that it is digital is very important because it makes the only possibility for it to have come into existence is for an all powerful and all knowing mind to have developed it. There is not enough eternities for chance to have done this. Only an all knowing mind could have come up with this. The odds for one functional protein to come into existence by chance was calculated at 1 in 10 to the 74 power. Or like trying to find one particular atom in the entire Milky Way Galaxy blind folded.

Let me add one more thing here. There is a three way link between DNA, RNA and Proteins. RNA is a copy of DNA but it is the RNA that the reader protein uses to assemble amino acids into a functional protein. But it is a Protein that is used to read code to make Proteins. That's a catch-22 situation. You must have all three created and present together before any of this will work.

Listen to the 6 minute YouTube presentation below. I hope what I have written above can help you grasp what they are saying in this video. I have been trying to point this out for years but when I say it is digital code I think that may just go by people because they do not know what digital code actually is.

Notice how the word "information" is used often in the video that I have supplied a link to. The entire universe was spoken into existence by a mind.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=qxhuxg3WRfg