The Creator Revealed

Dna and Design

Three Angels Broadcasting Network

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Series Code: TCR

Program Code: TCR180010A


00:30 Welcome to the Creator Revealed.
00:33 My name is Tim Standish, and I'm a scientist.
00:36 In fact, I spent about 20 years of my life
00:41 getting a PhD
00:44 that involved studying DNA.
00:49 This incredible molecule
00:52 that contains the plan
00:55 for much of what goes on in our bodies.
00:58 And it is so fascinating.
01:00 We're just so glad that you are joining us.
01:02 And if you're like me,
01:04 this is going to be something
01:05 that sometimes you look at and you go, "Whoa!
01:08 What did he just say?"
01:09 But what you'll see
01:11 is the Creator's design I believe,
01:14 that's what I see.
01:15 It's exciting to understand how God created us.
01:19 Exactly.
01:21 I think that DNA has been God's unique plan
01:25 for each person,
01:28 each organism out there that we see.
01:32 Because there are no two identical DNAs.
01:35 I mean, that's what makes us so unique.
01:38 This is what makes Shelley Quinn,
01:40 six foot tall, blue eyed person.
01:43 That's it. Yes.
01:44 Now we are more than just DNA.
01:48 But DNA is really important.
01:51 Before we dive into this,
01:52 I want us to consider these words
01:55 that were written by the Apostle Paul
01:57 to people living in a place called Colossae.
02:00 Okay, so he's writing to the Colossians
02:03 and he says, "For by Him" this is God, "
02:06 all things were created that are in heaven
02:10 and that are on earth, visible and invisible,
02:15 whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers.
02:19 All things were created through Him and for Him."
02:23 Amen.
02:25 And when we talk about DNA,
02:27 we're really talking about something that is invisible.
02:32 It's so small, we can't see it.
02:35 We can't see it with our naked eyes,
02:37 we can't see it with a light microscope.
02:40 If you use super-duper specialize kinds of techniques,
02:45 you can visualize it however.
02:48 And that...
02:49 And there's DNA in every molecule of our body?
02:51 Oh, yes. Well, every cell of our body.
02:53 Every cell. Yeah.
02:54 DNA is a molecule
02:56 and it's found in every tiny little cell in our bodies,
03:01 and I want to start out by talking a little bit
03:05 about one of the gentlemen who received a Noble Prize
03:10 for figuring out the structure of DNA.
03:13 This is me back in the olden days.
03:17 Back when I had just earned my PhD,
03:22 and I'm standing with a gentleman
03:26 named Francis Crick.
03:29 Now, if you know anything about DNA,
03:31 you know that Francis Crick received a Nobel Prize
03:35 for figuring out the double helical structure of DNA
03:40 and we gonna get that in, to that in just a moment.
03:43 But I want to say something about Francis Crick,
03:46 because, you know, Francis Crick,
03:49 in my very limited personal experience,
03:52 was actually a very gentlemanly man,
03:54 a kind man.
03:55 And I remember talking with him,
03:59 and how kind he was to me.
04:02 You know, I was just a new PhD.
04:05 I didn't feel that I knew very much
04:07 actually at the end of that.
04:08 And here is this man with a Nobel Prize
04:12 and his kindness really impressed me.
04:15 So I want to be careful about what I say about him.
04:20 But I am going to quote something that he said
04:24 which really made quite an impression on me.
04:27 He wrote this.
04:28 He said, "Biologists must constantly keep in mind
04:32 that what they see was not designed,
04:36 but rather evolved."
04:39 You see,
04:42 Francis Crick was a materialist.
04:45 He believed that the only things
04:48 that exist are the atoms essentially.
04:52 And he was a brilliant man.
04:55 And he wrote, I believe, quite eloquently
04:58 about science and about DNA.
05:01 But at the end of the day,
05:04 he imposed on himself a philosophy
05:08 that was intention with
05:11 what he was observing in nature.
05:14 And so he had to make this rule for himself
05:18 and for those who believed in the same way.
05:21 I, as a Christian,
05:24 do not have to impose blinders like this on myself.
05:27 If something looks designed,
05:31 then I am free to interpret it as being designed.
05:34 Yes.
05:36 If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck,
05:39 I'm allowed to say it's a duck.
05:41 Okay.
05:42 So that is a big difference
05:44 between the way that I think and the way that Francis Crick,
05:48 a man who I profoundly respect
05:51 but disagree with on this particular issue.
05:55 So this is the structure.
05:58 The double helix.
05:59 The double helix that Francis Crick figured out.
06:03 So DNA, this amazing molecule
06:07 that contains also to plans
06:10 for how our body is going to be.
06:12 This is what it looks like. It's like...
06:14 You can think of it as like two spirals staircases
06:17 that are spiraling around each other.
06:20 And the steps in there are things that we call bases.
06:25 So let's take a look at those.
06:27 I'm going to sort of untwist this molecule a little bit
06:30 so that we can see
06:32 what those A, Ts, and Gs, and Cs
06:35 look like in there
06:37 because those are the really important things,
06:40 that's where that information is coded.
06:43 And you can see those molecules there,
06:46 I'll put the As, and Ts, and Gs, and Cs on there.
06:49 Those are just letters of the alphabet
06:51 that we used to symbolize these specific chemicals
06:56 that you can see there.
06:57 The great thing about this structure...
07:00 Well, there are many, many, many things.
07:02 But you can encode information into that little alphabet,
07:07 that four letter alphabet all kinds of information.
07:10 There are about three billion of these A, Ts, Gs, and Cs
07:17 in the human genome.
07:19 That's amazing.
07:21 And if I was to take the DNA
07:22 that is inside one of your cells,
07:26 it would stretch out to approximately two meters long.
07:30 So it is longer than you are tall.
07:33 In just one cell? In just one microscopic cell.
07:37 That's amazing.
07:39 There, it's all packed up in there
07:40 and that contains a huge amount of information.
07:44 Okay, what do the P stand for? Protein?
07:47 Those stand for phosphates. Phosphates.
07:49 Okay. Okay. Yes.
07:51 So you can see that they're joined together by this.
07:53 It's a phosphate, and then a sugar,
07:55 and then a phosphate, and then a sugar,
07:57 and these bases, the A, Ts, Gs, and Cs
08:00 stick off the sugar path.
08:02 So the backbone is that sugar phosphate backbone that,
08:06 oh, I would love to spend
08:07 all the time talking about that,
08:09 but we better not.
08:10 Let's talk about these As, and Ts, and Gs, and Cs.
08:13 You can see that As and Ts
08:15 always match up with each other.
08:17 And Gs and Cs always match up with each other.
08:20 If we do, if we write out a whole bunch of them,
08:23 they would look something like this.
08:25 Now the great thing about this double helical structure
08:28 is that each side,
08:31 each strand contains 100% of the information
08:35 because of the rule that As always match up
08:38 with Ts and Gs always match up with Cs.
08:41 Okay.
08:42 Let's see how it works. All right.
08:43 If you pull the double helix apart,
08:46 the two strands apart, you can see,
08:49 you get something like this.
08:50 Well, in that top strand there, the light pink one,
08:55 the As are going to match up with what?
08:58 With the Ts. With the T, you're right.
09:00 So there is,
09:01 I can know what the other strand is going to be.
09:03 On the basis of this, it's going to start out with T.
09:05 All right, so you see some top to bottom,
09:06 A, T, A,T...
09:08 Precisely. T, A.
09:09 Okay. Okay.
09:11 So if you match things up,
09:13 you see that you get two identical strands
09:16 when this machinery of DNA replication
09:20 comes in and adds them in.
09:21 So how often is our body replicating this?
09:26 We're talking about millions of times a day,
09:28 billions of these
09:33 replication events occur in our body.
09:35 And you can see that because of the structure of DNA,
09:38 the way that you can unwind that double helix
09:42 and get two strands each
09:44 of which has a 100% of that information.
09:46 You can see why it is so incredibly accurate.
09:50 That is amazing.
09:52 It is unbelievably accurate what is going on there.
09:55 Now, the important thing about DNA is what?
10:00 It's obviously an amazing molecule,
10:02 but it contains a language,
10:05 information is encoded in there.
10:07 We're not even going to talk about that language,
10:09 but let's just say
10:10 this is the title of a scientific paper,
10:14 "The Genetic Code is One in a Million."
10:17 It is just a fantastic language and will leave it at that.
10:21 Okay. Okay.
10:23 Let's look at what a gene looks like.
10:28 Now, genes are what are encoded in DNA.
10:32 They are like the recipe for making the proteins
10:37 that are found inside our bodies
10:39 and in every other living thing.
10:43 I want to point out something interesting about genes.
10:46 All right.
10:48 Genes are made up of segments.
10:50 They're called exons.
10:52 So you can see I've numbered the segments of this PITX2 gene
10:58 as exons one through six.
11:01 The cool thing about each of these exons,
11:03 each of these segments is you can mix and match them.
11:07 So if you put them together,
11:10 if you use exons one, two, five, and six,
11:13 you'd make a protein called PITX2 Isoform a.
11:18 Don't worry about the language there.
11:19 Yes, okay.
11:21 Just understand that that's one kind of protein.
11:24 Now this gene can make another kind of protein
11:27 by taking different segments.
11:29 If it takes, one, two, three, five, and six,
11:31 it makes what's called Isoform b.
11:35 It's a related protein but it's different.
11:39 So how is that working in our body?
11:41 What this means is...
11:43 You can keep on doing this,
11:45 you can make a Isoform c as well.
11:46 Okay.
11:47 The point is, one protein can make many different...
11:53 Sorry, one gene can make many different proteins.
11:56 That's why we have little over 20,000 genes.
12:00 But we have a whole lot of proteins,
12:04 a lot more, a hundreds or thousands of proteins,
12:07 different proteins in our bodies.
12:08 And I remember from one of your presentations
12:09 "The proteins are the drive chefs."
12:12 Well, that's one protein in one of the molecular machines.
12:16 Those molecular machines are all made up of
12:18 many different proteins
12:20 that all have to work together...
12:22 That's amazing. In very precise way.
12:25 So yes,
12:27 what we see is that,
12:28 the genes are actually information processing systems.
12:31 They have to decide which protein to make.
12:34 We could go on and on and on forever.
12:36 And this is happening now thereon.
12:37 There's so much more that we could talk about,
12:39 but there is just a couple of things
12:42 that I want us to get out of this information.
12:45 The Creator is revealed in these molecules of life,
12:48 the DNA.
12:49 His wisdom is shown in His choice of materials like DNA,
12:54 with its stability, high coding efficiency
12:56 and associated mechanism of copying.
12:59 And His wisdom appears clearly in the information
13:02 that actually encoded in the DNA.
13:06 That is so amazing
13:08 and I know everybody's head is swimming
13:10 but please stay tuned.
13:11 We're going to be back in just one minute.
13:13 And we will be talking with a nano chemist,
13:16 who can tell us more.


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Revised 2019-04-15