Man’s achievements vs amazing ‘living computer’ technology
by Carl Wieland
Sometimes a comparison helps us grasp the fantastic design in miniature in the living
world. Let’s start by looking at an outstanding achievement of man’s
technology, the silicon chip shown here in the photo (right).
This chip is undoubtedly a brilliant feat of miniaturization. It requires enormous
amounts of skill and ingenuity to have so much information processing capacity in
an object small enough for an ant to hold in its jaws!
But before we get too carried away, let’s scale down to something even smaller
than the ant itself, the common dust mite—smaller than a pin-head.
Even smaller, E.coli bacteria can be clustered on the surface of a pin
point. We have now scaled down to a level which is dramatically smaller than the
silicon chip, and what we are looking at is these amazing biological machines. Each
one of these bacteria is a single cell with capabilities which outstrip anything
our technology has been able to put together. Among its many astonishing features
is the ability to make a complete copy of itself in only a few minutes!
The image to the left is a close-up view, going even further down in size, of these
E. coli bacteria. We’ve now left the silicon chip far, far behind
in miniaturization. Within each of these bacterial cells is their most ‘high-tech’
feature, namely their ‘central command module’—the amazingly designed
DNA molecule, with its incredible capacity to store information.
To the right is a stylized reconstruction of a small portion of the strand of DNA,
magnified still further. Each strand is so thin that if you drew out a pinhead with
a 2mm diameter till it was a wire as thin as DNA, the wire would be long enough
to go around the equator 33 times!1
This fantastic molecule is so way, way beyond the capacity of even our most advanced
information storage systems as to almost defy our capacity to describe it. It represents
the highest storage density of anything on Earth, i.e. the highest amount of information
which can be packed into a given space.
To help understand this, note that the amount of information in one strand2 of human DNA is the same as that in 1,000 books
of small print, each around 500 pages thick. Now imagine the total information carried
in every human being on Earth—that of one human multiplied five or six thousand
million times. If all that information were stored on DNA and packed into one volume,
it would be no bigger than a couple of aspirin tablets!3
The silicon chip, for all the intelligent effort it represents, has now vanished
into insignificance next to God’s design achievements. It seems unnecessary
to point out that such things are not the result of chance evolution.
The Bible says (Romans
1:20) that all who reject God are without excuse; the things He has made
testify clearly to His incredible intelligence and power.
Related articles
References and Notes
- Source: Information scientist Dr Werner
Gitt, in Faszination Mensch (in English as
The Wonder of Man). Return to text.
- Regarding the whole genome as one strand, regardless of the fact
that it is broken up into 23 chromosomes. Return to text.
- Source: French cytogeneticist Jerome LeJeune, famous for discovering
the cause of Down’s Syndrome, in Anthropotes, Rivista di studi sulla persona
e la famiglia, Citta Nuova Editrice, 1989. This is also confirmed by calculations
supplied by Dr Werner Gitt, whose book
In the Beginning was Information inspired this article. Return
to text.
(Available in Russian)
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