The Creator Revealed

Dna and Design

Three Angels Broadcasting Network

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Series Code: TCR

Program Code: TCR180010B


00:03 Oh, we're so glad you're still with us,
00:05 and we're going to explore DNA in human design
00:10 just a little bit more with a doctor of chemistry.
00:15 That's right, Dr. Ryan Hayes.
00:17 He teaches chemistry at Andrews University
00:19 in the department of chemistry and biochemistry there.
00:22 He sounds like a smart man.
00:24 He is a smart man
00:25 and that's a very good department, I know,
00:26 because I personally studied there for a number of years.
00:29 Yeah, so as an undergraduate,
00:31 I was a chemistry and zoology double major.
00:34 I never finished the chemistry which makes me weak, I guess.
00:38 I guess you'll say, I love the chemistry,
00:40 I just ran out of time and money.
00:42 And there have been times when I thought,
00:44 maybe I should go back and be like Dr. Ryan Hayes,
00:48 become a genuine chemist instead of an amateur chemist
00:52 which is really what biologists are.
00:55 So thank you, Dr. Hayes, for joining us.
00:58 We really appreciate it.
00:59 We've been talking about DNA,
01:02 and we know that DNA is a chemical,
01:08 but I guess the question that I would have is,
01:11 what's so special about it?
01:13 Why would DNA be such an important molecule
01:19 in humans and every other living thing?
01:25 Yeah.
01:26 I think there's a lot of important aspects of DNA
01:30 from a chemistry perspective,
01:32 and I think one of the things that strikes me
01:36 about the chemical structure of DNA is how flexible
01:41 it is chemically to allow all sorts of code
01:46 and arrangements of its structure,
01:49 what we call the bases of it to allow a wide variety,
01:55 almost an infinite number of chemical combinations.
01:59 So when you talk about the bases,
02:01 you're talking about the A, Ts, Gs, and Cs
02:05 and then they could be arranged in any sequence, yeah.
02:10 That's correct.
02:11 And that, actually,
02:13 you would think would be something obvious
02:15 to every chemist but, even as a PhD chemist,
02:19 I am looking at the structure of DNA for,
02:23 you know, many years.
02:25 It wasn't until I was reading the book by Stephen Meyer,
02:29 Signature in the Cell,
02:31 in pondering the structure once again
02:33 that it struck me,
02:36 that there isn't anything about the chemistry
02:39 that is driving the arrangement of the letters
02:43 and the bases there, that A, the T, the G, and the C,
02:46 that is completely chemically neutral
02:49 to just allows essentially any combination that you need.
02:54 I found that very surprising.
02:56 So let's say you had a T in the sequence,
02:58 anything could come after it,
03:00 there's nothing chemically that says,
03:03 an A must come immediately after a T
03:06 or something like that.
03:07 There're actually no rules in the sequencing of it.
03:12 That's correct. It's so much like...
03:16 Oh, there's number of analogies that really work here but,
03:19 you know, it seems like, well, maybe we're missing something
03:22 about the chemistry that maybe it's driving
03:24 the arrangement of the letters there
03:27 and actually it was Stephen Meyer,
03:30 and I really liked his analogy.
03:32 He actually likened it to.
03:33 There's my really bad magnetic board with some letters on it
03:37 that the DNA structure itself chemically
03:40 just allows any arrangement of letters,
03:43 the A, and the T, and the G, and C.
03:45 Now we know the A and T must match together,
03:49 and the G and the C must match
03:51 with each other across the strand.
03:54 But in any order of the rungs of this letter,
03:58 they can come in any arrangement.
04:00 So there isn't a chemical property
04:02 that is driving that arrangement,
04:05 it has to come from another source.
04:07 There has to be a source of information
04:11 that is driving what we see in the code.
04:14 I find that utterly amazing.
04:16 There's nothing in the structure,
04:18 they call it the sugar
04:20 and the phosphate backbone of the DNA.
04:22 Nothing there's driving the structure
04:24 and the base pairs themself,
04:27 there's nothing there that's driving the chemistry.
04:29 If it did, this was the thought that struck me.
04:32 If there were something chemically driving it,
04:34 we would see patterns there, we would see, you know,
04:38 so many Ts, and then an A,
04:40 so many Gs followed by a T.
04:42 There's no patterns.
04:44 It is completely random to our eyes.
04:46 Like us, if there were patterns there, then,
04:49 you actually wouldn't be able to code
04:50 very much information into it.
04:52 I mean,
04:54 if the letters of the alphabet had to be arranged
04:56 in just one specific order every time,
04:59 we wouldn't be able to spell
05:00 millions of different words with it.
05:02 And so here we're basically dealing with an alphabet,
05:05 a relatively simple alphabet with only four letters,
05:08 the A, T, G, and C.
05:10 And yet, we can come up with,
05:13 let's say, for all practical purposes
05:16 infinitely different sequences to code different things
05:20 into the genome.
05:21 But I think what I hear
05:23 if I'm understanding you correctly,
05:25 Dr. Hayes, what you're saying is
05:27 there's no chemical rule here
05:31 as far as how it strung together,
05:34 so it's the signature of the Creator,
05:38 I mean, something designed,
05:40 there's something engineered it.
05:42 But is that what you're saying?
05:46 That's right. How does...
05:48 How do you get if every arrangement is allowed
05:51 for letters or these codes that's in there?
05:55 Where did the arrangement come from that we see there?
05:59 Could it, you know, after, you know,
06:01 billions of years and, you know,
06:04 trial and error eventually come up to the right one.
06:06 The problem is, when there's even one letter that's wrong,
06:10 you get, you know, you get molecules,
06:13 and proteins, and enzymes
06:15 that don't work, so the code fails.
06:17 You need the correct code right from the beginning
06:22 and without it, you get failed results,
06:25 you get failed chemicals that don't do anything
06:27 or react improperly.
06:29 You need a working system from the get-go.
06:32 And you can't do that incrementally.
06:34 You got to have the information
06:36 before you can keep the information.
06:37 So information technology is really built into our DNA.
06:43 We've got all these little codes
06:44 that are going back and forth, right?
06:46 Just like a computer.
06:49 Absolutely. We are.
06:51 And that was a reluctance of mine was to give up,
06:54 I wanted just to be full of chemicals
06:56 that we were driven by chemical information
06:58 but honestly, it's just information
07:02 that has a chemical component.
07:04 It's enough of that.
07:05 Four letters, so if you have...
07:09 Showed an alphabet with just four letters,
07:11 then your words need to be longer
07:13 in order to have a wider variety of words
07:17 in combinations of letters.
07:19 So that's what DNA does.
07:20 It's just longer words.
07:22 They're really long in some cases.
07:24 But you can do a lot with four letters
07:27 when you can have short words and long words,
07:31 you can make a lot of unique components from that
07:35 or important sentences and words
07:37 if you want to use the information concept there.
07:40 Now, all are amazing, it's a great design
07:43 and so it's actually a fairly robust structure chemically,
07:47 so that's kind of nice to know.
07:48 Well, that was actually something
07:50 I wanted to ask about a little bit.
07:51 Obviously, if you have a bunch of information
07:54 and it's encoded in something that's really delicate
07:57 and can fall to pieces,
07:58 that information isn't going to last very well.
08:01 But I'm assuming that DNA is a fairly stable molecule
08:06 that it can last for a reasonable period of time.
08:09 It doesn't just keep falling to pieces inside us.
08:13 So it must be quiet robust.
08:18 It's a fairly robust molecule, so that's good.
08:22 Yeah, that keeps it from changing spontaneously,
08:26 so that's helpful, so in order to work with the code
08:30 that's there, you need helper molecules,
08:33 enzymes that come in and read it,
08:36 and split it apart
08:38 because at our body temperature
08:42 and pH the DNA molecule will want to stay together.
08:46 So that's important. Okay.
08:48 So this would be when you wanting to read
08:49 the information of it then or make a copy of it.
08:52 It has to...That double helix has to be opened up.
08:56 That's right.
08:57 You have to have a can opener,
08:59 you have to have a little machine
09:01 that can go through and open it at our body temperatures.
09:06 If you heat it, I believe it's to about 90 degree Celsius,
09:10 it will unravel on its own.
09:12 That's quite a high temperature and we would die before then.
09:16 That's almost to boiling water temperatures.
09:18 So at that high temperature, it will fall apart
09:22 but at lower temperatures
09:23 that our body is at 37 degrees Celsius
09:26 or 98 degrees Fahrenheit,
09:28 the DNA molecule wants to stay together,
09:31 and so you need a machine to pull it apart,
09:34 so you can read the individual bases that are there.
09:36 Beautiful. It is.
09:38 So what would be the possibility then of,
09:42 if you are wanting to make life using just,
09:45 you know, just starting with simple chemicals or something.
09:48 Would it be possible to start with something like, just DNA,
09:53 and work your way up
09:54 to all of these other protein machines
09:57 that we also know are necessary for life today.
10:02 Yeah, this is a great question and like,
10:05 a lot more chemists are getting involved with
10:07 because it's an enigma
10:09 where we can't see a little clear way chemically
10:13 to create life from some of these few simple molecules.
10:18 And so there was the original theory that
10:21 somehow these DNA molecules are,
10:25 you know, parts of it were able to come together.
10:28 But honestly that theory was discarded pretty quickly
10:31 and replaced with, well, we need proteins,
10:34 'cause you need the tools
10:36 which we call proteins and enzymes to make DNA,
10:40 so...
10:41 But the funny thing is DNA is needed to make the proteins.
10:45 Well, you need the proteins to make the DNA
10:47 so which one of these chickens and eggs comes first.
10:50 And so those both have been discarded chemically,
10:53 'cause you need both of them at the same time,
10:56 and so this hybrid theory
10:58 or maybe it's a ribonucleic acids,
11:00 the RNA, somehow is able to be one of the first molecules
11:05 that was spontaneously made.
11:08 And honestly,
11:10 I think that's pretty much a dead end
11:12 because we know that even in a simplest living organism
11:15 you need thousands of chemicals together.
11:17 It's not just DNA, I'm sure you need the code,
11:20 that's important.
11:21 But you need the proteins,
11:22 you need the chemical environment all be there,
11:26 just to even have the simplest life.
11:28 There's 3,000 or 4,000 chemicals,
11:30 you need chemicals in the simplest of organism
11:33 and they all have to come together at the same time.
11:36 What does this tell you about
11:39 the Creator's design of the body?
11:44 Oh, could you repeat the question?
11:46 Sorry.
11:47 What does this tell you about the Creator's
11:49 design of the human being?
11:52 Well, and every other living thing because everyone has DNA.
11:54 Yeah.
11:56 Well, first of all, He's an amazing chemist
11:59 so my hats off to our Creator,
12:03 because when you actually go into the lab
12:06 and actually try to make these molecules or things like it
12:10 or even simpler things,
12:12 you realize all of the problems that can occur,
12:16 all the side reactions,
12:18 not having pure starting materials
12:21 or having impure reactions that can take place,
12:25 and things that can get in the way,
12:27 and go down different tracks.
12:29 We're not seeing that this chemistry can just happen
12:33 spontaneously and easily.
12:35 And so there are so many factors...
12:38 It takes a master chemist to make these master chemicals.
12:42 Yeah. Absolutely.
12:44 That's what we're seeing now is that,
12:46 the more we learn, the more we know
12:48 how many factors had to be accounted for,
12:52 just to even make life happen and to sustain it,
12:56 don't have to just get it started but to sustain it.
12:58 I want to really thank you for taking this time with us,
13:00 Dr. Hayes.
13:02 It's been a great pleasure. I appreciate it.
13:04 Amen and amen.
13:05 Well, you know, this is so fascinating
13:08 and what I want to encourage you,
13:10 we're just touching on the surface of this.
13:15 Open your mind to science
13:19 and how it proves that we have a Creator God
13:25 and He is the Master of all science.
13:29 Join us again next time. Thank you.


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Revised 2019-04-15