Geoff Robinson Interviews Fazale Rana about The Cell's Design (page 3) Q: Do we find or do we expect to find software design patterns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns) in the cell's genetic code? A: I'm not a software engineer, so in many respects I don't feel fully qualified to address this question. Having said that, my sense is we will find software design patterns in the cell's information systems. In The Cell's Design, I propose what I call the Watchmaker Prediction. Accordingly, as human designers develop new technologies, examples of these technologies, which previously went unrecognized, will become evident in the operation of the cell's molecular systems. In other words, if life stems from the work of a Creator then it's reasonable to believe that life's biochemical machinery anticipates human technology advances. The Watchmaker Prediction applies to software design. Something quite interesting along these lines is recent work by a chemist from Trinity University (Dublin, Ireland). It turns out that when adenine, guanine, thymine (uracil), and cytosine are incorporated into DNA, they impart the double helix with a unique structural property that causes the information contained in this biomolecule to function like a parity code. Information scientists and technologists use parity codes to minimize error in the transfer of information. None of the other nucleobases that could have been used to build DNA impart this biomolecule with this special quality, only the specific combination of A, G, C, and T/U. Every time the cell's machinery transcribes a gene or replicates the DNA molecule information is transmitted. Transmission errors have disastrous consequences for the cell. Error minimization during information transfer, and consequently, DNA's parity code, exists as a critical structural feature of the cell's information systems. This extraordinary structural property of DNA indicates to me that a Mind bears responsibility for the cell's information systems. The even parity code found in DNA is identical to the ones used by information technologists. It as if an intelligent agent carefully selected of the nucleobases, A, G, C, and T (U) to optimize DNA's structure so that errors can be readily detected and minimized when information is transmitted.
Q: What are evolutionary explanations for those patterns and why are they insufficient? A: Most evolutionary biologists would evoke chemical selection as a way to explain the origin of information-rich biomolecules, (proteins and nucleic acids, like DNA and RNA). As astronomer Hugh Ross and I show in Origins of Life, chemical selection seems to play a minor, almost negligible, role in the formation of information-containing molecules. Because of the limited role that chemical selection plays, the formation of biochemical information systems, for all intents and purposes, appears to be a probability problem. And based on what is currently known, it appears to be astronomically improbable for the essential gene set to emerge through natural means alone. Still, this probability analysis is incomplete, since the fundamental relationships among sequence, structure, and function are still not known for proteins and DNA. When these relationships are better understood, it may turn out that it is much easier for mechanistic processes to generate information-rich molecules than anyone thinks. But these future insights also could make the probabilities of producing functional biomolecules more remote. The bottom line: Current knowledge about the capability of evolutionary processes is insufficient to either establish or rule out an evolutionary origin of biochemical information systems. While it is not completely possible at this point in time to calculate the probability of functional proteins emerging through natural means, it is possible to rigorously access the likelihood that the genetic code arose through natural processes. The genetic code is the set of rules the cell's machinery uses to translate proteins from the information stored in DNA. Simply put, there does not appear to be enough time for evolutionary processes to stumble upon the universal genetic code-a code which displays exceptional levels of design in terms of its error minimization capacity. As I describe in The Cell's Design, biophysicist Hubert Yockey has determined that natural selection would have to explore 1.40 x 1070 different genetic codes to discover the universal genetic code found in nature. Yockey estimated 6.3 x 1015 seconds is the maximum time available for the code to originate. Natural selection would have to evaluate roughly 1055 codes per second to find the universal genetic code. On this basis alone, the universal genetic code, which defines biochemical information, can't have an evolutionary origin. |
