Intelligent Design and the Language of Life

[RustyAngeL]

On 5/6/2016 at 1:11 PM, Saved.One.by.Grace said:

Soruce: http://www.livescience.com/52811-spooky-action-is-real.html

So we've proven quantum entanglement is real, not spooky.  So the more theoretical physicists learn, the more God reveals His fingerprints on this universe, from the seen to the unseen.

Who do atheists believe is the coder of DNA?  Sophisticated code like DNA doesn't happen by accident.

Nothing in God's world happens by accident.  We as believers know that.

[SavedOnebyGrace]

Is God Real?

Science gives ample reason to believe in God. Why is DNA important?

British philosopher, Dr. Antony Flew, was a leading spokesperson for atheism, actively involved in debate after debate. However, scientific discoveries within the last 30 years brought him to a conclusion he could not avoid. In a video interview in December 2004 he stated, "Super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature."¹ Prominent in his conclusion were the discoveries of DNA. Here's why.

DNA in our cells is very similar to an intricate computer program. In the photo on the left, you see that a computer program is made up of a series of ones and zeros (called binary code). The sequencing and ordering of these ones and zeros is what makes the computer program work properly.

In the same way, DNA is made up of four chemicals, abbreviated as letters A, T, G, and C. Much like the ones and zeros, these letters are arranged in the human cell like this: CGTGTGACTCGCTCCTGAT and so on. The order in which they are arranged instructs the cell's actions.

computer programming:

DNA code:

 

What is amazing is that within the tiny space in every cell in your body, this code is three billion letters long!!²

To grasp the amount of DNA information in one cell, "a live reading of that code at a rate of three letters per second would take thirty-one years, even if reading continued day and night."³ Wait, there's more.

It has been determined that 99.9% of your DNA is similar to everyone's genetic makeup.⁴ What is uniquely you comes in the fractional difference in how those three billion letters are sequenced in your cells.

The U.S. government is able to identify everyone in our country by the arrangement of a nine-digit social security number. Yet, inside every cell in you is a three-billion-lettered DNA structure that belongs only to you. This code identifies you and continually instructs your cells' behavior.

The rest of this article is continued here: http://www.everystudent.com/wires/Godreal.html

[SavedOnebyGrace]

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/books/review/the-gene-by-siddhartha-mukherjee.html?_r=0

Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.  The latest reports have animal and human recombinant DNA creating something not meant to be in God's creation.  Are the Old Testament giants the result of angelic experiments on DNA?  How did we go down this rabbit hole so fast.  This book review gives a roadmap to where we are today.

New York Times Book Review | Nonfiction

‘The Gene,’ by Siddhartha Mukherjee

By JAMES GLEICK MAY 12, 2016

Photo

Credit Michael DeForge

THE GENE
An Intimate History
By Siddhartha Mukherjee
592 pp. Scribner. $32.

Even before the beginning of human history, people recognized that parents transmit something — call it “likeness” — to their children, and the children to their children, and so on down the generations. But how?

In the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras theorized that male semen conveyed the information into female bodies, which provided nourishment. Two hundred years later, Aristotle, observing that some Greeks resembled their mothers and grandmothers, proposed that women as well as men carry their likeness, in the blood. (We still speak of bloodlines and blood relatives.) Aristotle said, rightly, that creatures must pass along not just material, like wood for a carpenter, but a message: “the shape and the form.”

During the next two millenniums, little more was learned. When Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” in 1859, he was uncomfortably aware that his entire theory of evolution rested atop a foundation that could not be seen. A theory of heredity was yet to come.

In 1883, the German biologist August Weismann cut off the tails of seven female and five male white mice. Would their offspring have tails or not? To us it seems obvious, but no one knew for sure. Before he was done, Weismann had severed 901 tails through five generations of mice. No tail-less mice were born. Thus science marches on.

Heredity was the “missing science,” the ever prescient H.G. Wells remarked at the turn of the century: “This unworked mine of knowledge on the borderland of biology and anthropology, which for all practical purposes is as unworked now as it was in the days of Plato, is, in simple truth, 10 times more important to humanity than all the chemistry and physics, all the technical and industrial science that ever has been or ever will be discovered.”

This missing science we now know as genetics. Its elusive fundamental particle, the essential unit of biological information, we call the gene. First the idea of the gene had to be invented. Then the physical entity, present in each cell of our bodies, in every living thing, had to be discovered. The story of this invention and this discovery has been told, piecemeal, in different ways, but never before with the scope and grandeur that Siddhartha Mukherjee brings to his new history, “The Gene.” He fully justifies the claim that it is “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science.”

Photo

Siddhartha MukherjeeCredit Deborah Feingold

As he did in his Pulitzer ­Prize-winning history of cancer, “The Emperor of All Maladies” (2010), Mukherjee views his subject panoptically, from a great and clarifying height, yet also intimately. Framing his story are pieces of his own family history: His cousin and two of his uncles “suffered from various unravelings of the mind,” and the specter of mental illness, presumably inherited or inheritable, haunts his family and his imagination. The books form a magnificent pair. “The Emperor of All Maladies” is, as Mukherjee notes, the story of the genetic code corrupted, tipping into malignancy. The new book, then, serves as its prequel.

“Nothing about the natural world, at first glance, suggests the existence of a gene,” he writes. “Indeed, you have to perform rather bizarre experimental contortions to uncover the idea of discrete particles of inheritance.” The man who performed those bizarre contortions was the monk Gregor Mendel, living in an abbey in Brno, Austria-Hungary (now in the Czech Republic). The abbey had five acres of garden. Forbidden by the abbot to experiment on field mice, Mendel began growing peas. And he did not just plant them; he made hybrids, crossing tall plants with short plants, white flowers with purple flowers, smooth pods with crumpled pods.

“He began to discern patterns in the data — unanticipated constancies, conserved ratios, numerical rhythms,” Mukherjee writes. “He had tapped, at last, into heredity’s inner logic.” After almost eight plodding years he wrote a paper, which he read in 1865 to a room of farmers and botanists in Brno and published in the yearly “Proceedings of the Brno Natural Science Society.” And then — nothing. The history of science is a tangled web, not a logical arc, and for four decades Mendel’s pioneering work — “the study that founded modern biology,” as Mukherjee describes with only a touch of hyperbole — effectively disappeared.

The founding of modern biology had to wait till the turn of the century. Mendel’s forgotten paper was discovered by biologists in Amsterdam, Cambridge and elsewhere. Mendel had discovered the basic unit of heredity, had proved there must be such a unit, and finally a Danish botanist, Wilhelm Johannsen, gave it a name: “gene,” he suggested — “a very applicable little word.”

What is the gene? First it was an abstraction, an enigma, “a ghost lurking in the biological machine,” Mukherjee writes. By definition the gene was the carrier of any trait that is heritable or partly heritable. One would say there are genes for eye color, height or even intelligence. But some traits are better defined than others. People have long bred dogs, for example, to be “short-haired, longhaired, pied, piebald, bowlegged, hairless, crop-tailed, vicious, mild-mannered, diffident, guarded, belligerent.”

In the 20th century, new technologies and new disciplines brought this abstract and hypothetical idea into sharper and sharper focus. The epiphany came in the discovery by James Watson, Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin of a vivid physical form, the famous double helix, the winding base pairs of DNA. Genes are strung along chromosomes like beads on strings (the common metaphor). Scientists isolated them and counted them: 21,000 to 23,000 to make a human being.

The gene is a message. It is an instruction for building a protein. It can be a blueprint encoding the design for a structure, or more accurately, as Richard Dawkins has suggested, a recipe encoding a process. The genome is an algorithm, and at the same time, it is a code, which had to be laboriously and ingeniously deciphered. It is the beginning and ending of an endless circle of life: A gene is a message, which builds a protein, which creates form and function, which regulates the gene.

Mukherjee arranges his history not just chronologically but thematically. This is necessary. Science seldom progresses in a neat logical order anyway, but genetics, especially, encompasses and influences many subjects at once: biology, information science, even psychiatry. Genetics has also played its part in the darkest currents of 20th-century history. One need only remember that Nazi genetics is a subject of its own, aimed at the improvement of Übermenschen by the elimination of the feebleminded and “degenerate.” But the social impulse for eugenics started earlier, in England and in the United States. More recently, we have lived through debates tinged with poorly understood notions of race. In the 1980s, James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrn­stein linked criminal violence to “bad genes” in “Crime and Human Nature.” Herrnstein returned in the 1990s with the incendiary “The Bell Curve,” written with Charles Murray, which claimed that whites and Asians had a genetic advantage over people of African descent in “intellectual capacity.”

Mukherjee’s analysis of these episodes is clarifying and, in my view, definitive. He notes the narrow and shifting definitions of “intelligence” and its measure by flawed and culturally bound tests. To understand the debate properly, though, we need to recognize how artificial our racial categories are to begin with. The explosion of knowledge that has come from the Human Genome Project and its successors allows statistical measures of genetic diversity in groups we classify as “races.” Between the races, diversity is slight; within them, diversity is enormous.

The gene is, and is not, the determiner of our identity. It behooves us to accept this paradox and understand it. As we learn how our genome defines us, we also learn how we transcend our genome. The gene, in the era of recombinant DNA, has become an instrument of its own manipulation. We have gene therapies and gene editing. In what Mukherjee calls the “post-genomic” world, we will wield a power as exhilarating as it is treacherous. Simply put, “We will learn to read and write our selves, ourselves.”

James Gleick’s books include “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood” and “Time Travel,” which will be published in the fall.

 

[SavedOnebyGrace]

Do we have the wisdom to play God?

[kwikphilly]

Blessings SavedOne,,,,,,

    Ever see the movie "Splice",,,,,,cool sci-fi movie,"Just because we CAN does not mean we SHOULD",-reminded me of the movie,,,,,,,

I am not in agreement with anyone ever "playing God" & that is just where this type of thing leads to,imo

[SavedOnebyGrace]

26 minutes ago, kwikphilly said:

Blessings SavedOne,,,,,,

    Ever see the movie "Splice",,,,,,cool sci-fi movie,"Just because we CAN does not mean we SHOULD",-reminded me of the movie,,,,,,,

I am not in agreement with anyone ever "playing God" & that is just where this type of thing leads to,imo

I agree.  I am horrorified that some scientists are now using recombinant DNA between humans and animals.  There's no end to the perversity that's possible with this kind of tinkering.  No wonder many believe, as I do, that Jesus is coming back soon.  As for the movie "Splice", I'm sure I've seen it because I watch a lot of science fiction stories.  Science Fiction now becomes Science Fact.  Frightening what could or will happen.

[kwikphilly]

Quote

King James Bible
Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.                                             Leviticus 19:19

God forbade these types of things,,,,,,let alone HUMANS with animals,utter perversion! And God always warns us for good reason not just because HE SAYS SO!!!!  But honestly,"because He says so" is good enough for me,,,,,,,these things will undoubtedly have horrible consequences & disastrous results,,,,,,,very scarey indeed!

[SavedOnebyGrace]

3 minutes ago, kwikphilly said:

God forbade these types of things,,,,,,let alone HUMANS with animals,utter perversion! And God always warns us for good reason not just because HE SAYS SO!!!!  But honestly,"because He says so" is good enough for me,,,,,,,these things will undoubtedly have horrible consequences & disastrous results,,,,,,,very scarey indeed!

The Torah is quite specific on what is allowed, and what God finds offensive.  His word is good enough for me as it also is for you.  I'm willing to bet some of our tax dollars are somehow being funded for this research.  Some things should not be done, and this is one of them.  I sometimes wonder if fallen angels were somehow the inspiration of some of the mythical creatures various pagan religions and mythology have spawned from earlier ages.

[kwikphilly]

Quote

 I sometimes wonder if fallen angels were somehow the inspiration of some of the mythical creatures various pagan religions and mythology have spawned from earlier ages.                                                                          posted by Saved.One.by.Grace

Oh,I have no doubt about that,,,,,,,even in hieroglyphics & the early symbols,drawings etc,,,, we find these odd looking man/beast images or strange looking 'creatures" that are very similar in different parts of the world & man tries to attribute it to the possibility of a "higher form of life" from other "planets",,,,,,really" like "aliens",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,I believe they were demons & they influenced many pagans to worship them as "gods",,,,,,,,surely that makes much more sense than aliens.......the "god" of this world

Quote

King James Bible
In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.                                                                          2 Cor 4:4

 I think in earlier times they may have manifested themselves to some,more so than today where they are even more insidious

[SavedOnebyGrace]

1 minute ago, kwikphilly said:

Oh,I have no doubt about that,,,,,,,even in hieroglyphics & the early symbols,drawings etc,,,, we find these odd looking man/beast images or strange looking 'creatures" that are very similar in different parts of the world & man tries to attribute it to the possibility of a "higher form of life" from other "planets",,,,,,really" like "aliens",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,I believe they were demons & they influenced many pagans to worship them as "gods",,,,,,,,surely that makes much more sense than aliens.......the "god" of this world

 I think in earlier times they may have manifested themselves to some,more so than today where they are even more insidious

You and I are so on the same page, if I didn't know you were a righteous woman of God (in Jesus name), I'd swear you're reading my mind.  God bless you my dear, special sister.  I've been down lately and it doesn't have any cause or reason.  But your posts, even if I'm not actively responding, brighten my day and give me hope that a remnant of God-fearing people are still actively persuing God's truth through His word.  God bless you.