Participants:
Series Code: TCR
Program Code: TCR180010B
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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. |
Revised 2019-04-15