Dr. N.L. Kachhara
Religious beliefs have always held that there is an intelligent cause for origin of life. The arguments put forward by proponents of religion have reason and logic, though they may not qualify to be scientific in the strict sense. We review a paper presented by Charles B. Thaxton on the subject of DNA, Design and the Origin of Life.
The design argument assumes that the order we see in the world around us bears an analogy to the kind of order exhibited by human artifacts. Since the two kinds of order are similar, the cause of one must be similar to the cause of the other. The order in human artifacts is the result of human intelligence. Therefore, the order in the world must be the result of an intelligent being (creator). DNA is considered the identifying mark of a living system. In recent years, scientists have applied information theory to biology, and in particular to the genetic code. The amount of information in the DNA of even the single celled bacterium, E. coli, is vast indeed. It is greater than the information contained in the books in any of world's largest libraries. A DNA code is a very special kind of order. The sequence of nucleotides in DNA or amino acids in a protein is like the letters in a written language. There is no detectable difference between the sequence of nucleotides in E. Coli DNA and a random sequence of nucleotides. Yet within the E. Coli cells, the sequence of "letters" of its DNA is very specific. Only that particular sequence is capable of biological function.
The discovery that life in its essence is information inscribed on DNA has greatly narrowed the question of life's origin. With the insights from information theory we need no longer argue from order in a general sense. Order with low information content does arise by natural processes. However, there is no convincing experimental evidence that order with high information content can arise by natural process. Indeed, the only evidence we have is that it takes intelligence to produce the second kind of order. If we want to speculate on how the first informational molecules came into being, the most reasonable speculation is there was some form of intelligence around at that time. Even the simplest form of life, with their store of DNA, is characterized by specified complexity. Therefore life itself is prima facie evidence that some form of intelligence was in existence at the origin of DNA code. The claim that DNA arose by material forces is to say that information can arise by material forces. However, the material base of a message is completely independent of the information transmitted. The material base could not have anything to do with the messages' origin. The information within the genetic code is entirely independent of the chemical makeup of the DNA molecule. To accept a material cause for the origin of life actually runs counter to the principle of uniformity.
Scientists still hold the view that physical information exists regardless of the presence of intelligence, and evolution allows for new information whenever a novel mutation or gene duplication occurs and is kept. It does not need to be beneficial nor visually apparent to be "information". However, even if those were requirements they could be satisfied with the appearance of nylon-eating bacteria, which required new enzymes to digest a material that never existed until the modern age.
