In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood

Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.

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[ The Scientific Case for Creation > Life Sciences > The Theory of Organic Evolution Is Invalid. > Life Is So Complex That Chance Processes, Even over Billions of Years, Cannot Explain How Life Began. > Genetic Information]

33. Genetic Information

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Figure 15: The Third Dimension. Shown above is an artist’s representation of the DNA (totaling 7 feet in length) which is stuffed inside the nucleus in each of about 30,000,000,000,000 (thirty trillion) cells in your body. Each color represents the DNA in one of 23 pairs of chromosomes. The amount of information in that DNA is staggering; it is the equivalent of about 4,000 books.^a For a human, 3 billion letters^b must be precisely sequenced. (Imagine the total information in all animals and plants.) Each strand is folded in three-dimensional shapes (or loops) that bring tiny segments of DNA close to other segments with which they must interact. Amazingly, the folding is different for each type of cell in your body! Before a cell can divide, this DNA must be refolded into two separate cylindrical shapes, all without tangling.^c (Refolding takes about 15 minutes.) Although this has been filmed,^d how it happens and functions almost flawlessly is currently unknown.^e Complexity is superimposed upon complexity—all within a volume that is less than one ten-thousandth the size of a grain of sand!^f

How could any reasonable person claim that this unfathomable complexity arose by chance through natural processes (in other words, evolution)—even over billions of years? Clearly, it is irrefutable evidence of a Designer Whose intelligence is beyond our comprehension!

Natural processes cannot produce large amounts of information. The genetic information in the DNA of each human cell is roughly equivalent to a library of 4,000 books.^a

Even if matter and life somehow arose—perhaps only a bacterium—the probability that mutations and natural selection produced this vast amount of information is essentially zero.^g It would be similar to producing 4,000 books with the following procedure:^h

a. Start with a meaningful phrase.

b. Retype the phrase, but add letters and make some errors.

c. See if the new phrase is meaningful.

d. If it is, replace the original phrase with it.

e. Return to step “b.”

To produce just the enzymes in one organism would require more than 10^40,000 trials.ⁱ (To begin to understand how large 10^40,000 is, realize that the visible universe contains fewer than 10⁸⁰ atoms.)

In 1972,^j evolutionists, out of ignorance,^k began referring to large segments of DNA as “junk” DNA, because it supposedly had no purpose and was left over from our evolutionary past. What evolutionists called “junk” DNA is now known to contain millions of switches that regulate gene activity at specific times and in unique ways for each of thousands of different types of cells. Most genetic changes that cause disease lie outside the genes and on the 95% of the DNA that evolutionists used to call “junk.”^l

In humans, 2,000 genes are “indispensable for viability.” They are required “for basic cellular functions such as cell division, transcription, translation, DNA replication, cycle control, and fundamental metabolism.”ⁱ Suppose, after millions of years, 1999 of these essential genes had evolved, but one had not yet evolved. What would have happened? Extinction! Human evolution would have had to start all over again. Life’s complexity is mind boggling—not something that random processes could ever produce. Obviously, all 2,000 had to come into existence simultaneously. But that is creation!

Based on all known experience—scientific or otherwise—information comes only from intelligence. Vast amounts of information require a vast intelligence.

Follow the Money

The public is generally unaware that most scientists and university researchers are continually scrambling to find a governmental agency, corporation, or individual to fund their research. Grant money is needed to pay the scientists’ salaries and attract others to come to work for them. Researchers’ jobs, power, and prestige depend on that funding. Used car salesmen have gotten a bad name for the dishonest claims of a few. The evolutionist community, in the pursuit of grant money, is much worse.^a [See "The Elephant in the Living Room" on page 21.]

Evolutionist Lynn Margulis (1938–2011), a famous University of Massachusetts biology professor and the former wife of Carl Sagan, describes a conversation she had with Richard Lewontin, a leading evolutionary biologist:^b

“Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, about 6 years ago, and he mathematized all of it—changes in the population, random mutation, sexual selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, ‘You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.’

“This just appalled me. So I said, ‘Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?

“He looked around and said, ‘It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if I don’t do it, I won’t get my grant money.’ So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.” [emphasis added]

Lewontin’s example is just the tip of the iceberg. The United States government doles out more than five billion U.S. dollars each year to universities for evolutionary-based research. These research universities do not hire professors who openly question evolution. Other financial incentives motivate evolutionists, such as their 25-billion-dollar-a-year-textbook industry, which greatly increases an author’s ability to receive a prestigious and lucrative professorship and research grants. Many of those grants are for research that assumes evolution or will attempt to solve problems resulting from accepting evolution.

Hundreds of examples could be given. Later in this book, two big examples will be discussed: “dark energy” and “dark matter.” Public teachers caught teaching scientific evidence opposing evolution or supporting creation and the flood are often fired, because supervisors are fearful of expensive ACLU lawsuits. Who are the losers in this financial web? Students, tax payers, and scientific progress.

All these universities maintain offices that continually feed press releases and video clips to the media describing scientific work of their faculties. These releases frequently contain evolutionary ideas, as if they are widely accepted facts that all educated people understand. When the media want information or verification for a possible story, they often call these universities for assistance. The media office usually has a professor familiar with the specific subject call the reporter for a live interview. Not only does this quickly give the editor or producer confidence to print or broadcast a story, it enhances the stature of the professor, his or her academic department, the university, the media outlet, and the reporter. Everyone seemingly wins—if the story is accurate. If the story is inaccurate, as is often the case when evolution is pushed, the misinformed public is the loser. If a media outlet ever releases a story citing evidence opposing evolution, that outlet will be inundated with intimidating complaints, many orchestrated by those in the university.

Universities also have offices that seek and coordinate grant-seeking efforts. Typically 50% of every research grant, is for the university’s “overhead.” The remainder is for the researcher’s salary and research. If a professor does not bring in enough in grants, his income is reduced and his job is in jeopardy. So universities have a powerful financial incentive to promote evolution—another reason why they hire only evolutionists and use evolution-oriented textbooks. Naturally, most students graduating from these universities end up as evolutionists.

Despite these powerful financial incentives and people like Lewontin promoting evolution, the public has generally rejected evolution. [See Endnote 1 and Figure 251 on page 575.] Also, the history of science shows that scientific controversies are eventually resolved, sometimes after centuries, in favor of the side with the strongest evidence. The 131 categories of evidence listed in just Part I of this book are not going away. Genetic information alone (Category 33), if understood, would settle the matter.

Can you see why college textbooks are so outrageously expensive and why evolutionists will not enter a publishable, strictly scientific debate on the creation-evolution issue? [See “The Written Debate Offer” pages 588.]

The Elephant in the Living Room

Writer George V. Caylor interviewed Sam, a molecular biologist. George asked Sam about his work. Sam said he and his team were scientific detectives, working with DNA and tracking down the causes of disease. Here is their published conversation.^a

G: “Sounds like pretty complicated work.”

S: “You can’t imagine how complicated!”

G: “Try me.”

S: “I’m a bit like an editor, trying to find a spelling mistake inside a document larger than four complete sets of Encyclopedia Britannica. Seventy volumes, thousands and thousands of pages of small print words.”

G: “With the computer power, you can just use ‘spell check’!”

S: “There is no ‘spell check’ because we don’t know yet how the words are supposed to be spelled. We don’t even know for sure which language. And it’s not just the ‘spelling error’ we’re looking for. If any of the punctuation is out of place, or a space out of place, or a grammatical error, we have a mutation that will cause a disease.”

G: “So how do you do it?”

S: “We are learning as we go. We have already ‘read’ over two articles in that encyclopedia, and located some typos.’’ It should get easier as time goes by.”

G: “How did all that information happen to get there?”

S: “Do you mean, did it just happen? Did it evolve?”

G: “Bingo. Do you believe that the information evolved?”

S: “George, nobody I know in my profession truly believes it evolved. It was engineered by ‘genius beyond genius,’ and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book. Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise. A bit like Neil Armstrong believing the moon is made of green cheese. He’s been there!”

G: “Have you ever stated that in a public lecture, or in any public writings?”

S: “No. It all just evolved.”

G: “What? You just told me —?”

S: “Just stop right there. To be a molecular biologist requires one to hold on to two insanities at all times. One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself. Two, it would be insane to say you don’t believe in evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures—everything would stop. I’d be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where I couldn’t earn a decent living.” [emphasis added]

G: “I hate to say it, Sam, but that sounds intellectually dishonest.”

S: “The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind’s worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the ‘elephant in the living room’.”

G: “What elephant?”

S: “Design. It’s like the elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up an enormous amount of space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn’t there!”

Notice in this example, and in "Follow the Money" on page 20, how easy it is to become intellectually dishonest when you have an inflated view of your work, income, and prestige—and you and others around you realize that your work’s foundational assumption—evolution—has major (and quite likely, fatal) scientific problems.