A reader writes: “I recently heard John Mackay at a meeting at Edinburgh Scotland and was impressed with his presentation and approach. I have relayed to one of my colleagues how he explained that Thymine has a higher affinity for Thymine so it supports design being involved in DNA creation. He went off disbelieving of this and found out that this is only under UV light or infra-red energy which to me would be the conditions Evolutionists would think was there in the beginning. Can you please refer me to the exact research John was referring to and the arguments that go with it to help me reason with this person. They also think that with time, evolution, i.e. the creation of DNA, the world, could just happen. How can I reason against this?”
Editorial Comment: Dr Eager replies:
The bases that act as the letters in DNA are attached to the sugar-phosphate backbone and the base on the opposite strand, but not to bases on either side of them along the DNA strand. If they do bond with adjacent bases they cannot be read by the DNA copying machinery. In ultra-violet (UV) light adjacent thymine bases can bond with one another to form a thymine dimer. Normally the DNA surveillance and repair mechanisms will find thymine dimers, remove them and replace them with normal letters, as the thymine–thymine bond destroys the coded information sequence. When there is a lot of UV light the repair mechanism cannot keep up with the damage, and the genes containing them are not copied properly. This is a well-known cause of skin cancer. Thymine dimers are good evidence against evolution and for creation for the following reasons:
- The evolutionists claim that UV light is a source of energy for forming pre-biotic organic chemicals. UV light would make more thymine dimers which destroys the information in DNA, rather than enable the formation of properly configured DNA with all the base bonding in meaningful ways to the backbone and the opposite bases.
- DNA within cells tends to be degraded by UV unless the surveillance repair mechanism can maintain it. The repair mechanism involves many proteins, which are coded for by DNA. This is an example of irreducible complexity. If the repair mechanisms are not there, or are even partly defunct, the cells can become cancerous or are deliberately destroyed by the body. We know this because there is rare inherited tendency to form skin cancer caused by damage to the repair mechanism that normally removes damaged DNA. (Try searching for “Xeroderma pigmentosa”)
- Whilst the chemical behaviour and structure of DNA can be explained by the laws of chemistry, the information carried in the sequence of chemical letters along the strands of DNA cannot. To understand, think of written information on a printed page. Chemistry will explain the colour of the ink and how it is bonded to the paper, but it will not explain the difference between an ink blot and a page of organized information printed with that same ink in a science textbook. That difference did not come from the properties of the ink, but from the creative minds of the Intelligent Authors, interpreted by the intelligent minds of readers who have been pre-programmed to know what organized bits of ink communicate.
Evidence News 31st May 2006
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