This is a bit of an own goal, sent to me by the Islamic creationist, Harun Yahya.
Darwinists never realize that even though it’s impossible for them to copy out a text consisting of billions of letters without errors creeping in, enzymes combine together millions of units of information as they copy DNA, without making a single mistake. This is simply more proof of the existence of God.
Except that DNA polymerase, the enzyme that copies DNA, makes errors at a rate of about 10-8 mistakes per base pair (error correction processes bring that down to about 10-10 errors per base pair). Whoops. God makes mistakes! Also, while the DNA in the background of the image is correctly exhibiting a right-handed twist, the large orangeish fragment in the foreground seems to have a left-handed coil, in addition to being drawn with a strange and incorrect stick-and-ball arrangement. Tsk, tsk. Wrong and inconsistent. Does he really think this kind of crap will persuade a biologist? Why is he sending it to me?
Although, to be fair, I don’t think most people think chemistry has to be flawless to be compatible with gods, and obviously evolution depends on variation produced by errors, so this whole line of argument is irrelevant.
He probably doesn’t know better, and his intended audience doesn’t know any better. If he doesn’t know any better, then this was his attempt at a “checkmate evolutionists” meme.
Even if the replication was without error, the fact that there is carbon-14 in the atmosphere that could be incorporated into the purine and pyrimidine moieties of the base pairs, then undergo beta emission prior to replication in the testes and ovaries to change the structure of the base pair and hence cause a mutation in the next generation, is ignored.
Ignorance has no bounds.
Q: What should you do when an Islamic Creationist won’t shut up?
A: Muzzl’ ‘im!
Aw, quit picking on poor Harun Y – doesn’t he have enough to worry about with Trump considering extraditing his main man Fethullah Gulen once the Istanbul T-Tower gets approved?
Spread the word, folks: Harun Yahya ♥ Fethullah Gulen!
Shit, DNA never makes any mistakes? If only the good Harun Yahya has been able to tell that to my chondrosarchoma. It would have saved me a lot of time and trips to Boston to have my sacrum removed.
So, does this mean errors HAVE creeped into the bible?
Wow, so all of those cancer centers and birth defects specialists are bankrupt, due to a lack of patients.
Alas, no, they’re doing a good business. But, the fellow is an excellent example of why we banned mercury in thermometers.
The average person has 50-150 de novo mutations compared to their parental DNA.
We know this from sequencing the DNA of…parents and children.
Could have been worse: Harun Yahya, nee Adnan Oktar, could have sent you pictures of his “kittens”.
(and no, I couldn’t bring myself to watch the video)
http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/15089/1/turkeys-anti-evolutionist-showgirls
Weird, I rarely have issues copying files containing several gigabytes.
Now you know who manages DropBox: it’s God.
@10 oliverkurth
Came in to say this. A gigabyte is, what, 8 billion binary characters (bits)? Does that not count as billions of letters, which computers copy all the time without problems?
@oliverkurth #10 @zibble #12
I have some 1TB USB disks which make a bit error about every 4 trillion bits. It might not be the disks fault but the USB connections.
The reason that DNA has a higher error rate is that it is tolerable for the biological systems, maybe even beneficial because it enables evolution. Computer software would derail pretty fast at that rate, so the error rate is pushed down by using larger margins in the hardware and lots of error correction.
So…. um…. there’s a theory that all life is processes done by human beings copying information by hand from one place to another? And he has disproved this theory. I can accept that.
Okay, to be a little more fair…. There is a hypothesis that nothing in the universe consists of any more complicated or precise than can be done by human beings by hand? And he disproved that. I can accept that as well.
Er your CPU can do *trillions* of copy operations without a single mistake. Individual gates have predicted failure rates of better than 10^-18 … and it was a couple years back that I checked that. (and higher end processors as in top-of-line mainframes will have multi-channel checks to halt and restart a pipeline on checks that will catch the bulk of random errors
IBM once upon a time wondered why CPU’s at the top of a building had more errors than those in basements. Cosmic rays. Really. Hence embedded checks.
— TWZ