(ORDO NEWS) — Here are three unrelated but surprising discoveries that will be of interest to intelligent design theorists.
Common code
Scientists at Flinders University in Australia have discovered that our DNA travels up to a meter around us without even touching anything . We leave breadcrumbs of the genetic code everywhere we go!
A person can leave DNA on a surface without even touching it , a Flinders University study has shown, and the longer a person spends indoors, the more likely they are to leave a mark.
The researchers placed the DNA collection plates between half a meter and five meters apart in the sanitized offices.
If no one directly touched the plates, then a day later they had DNA from several people, and the DNA profiles were the stronger, the closer the plates were to the person and the longer he was in the room.
They published their results in the journal Forensic Science International Genetics.
This discovery will alarm criminals as they learn that the police can be on their trail even without fingerprints. For others, it illustrates two things: (1) forensic science is an example of intelligent design in action, and (2) our Earth is truly a privileged planet. It’s loaded with complex, predetermined information!
What other world in our solar system can boast such a distinction? Just think: coded information is everywhere in our world: in the clouds, on the walls of rocks, in the soil, and even under the seabed. Code not only inhabits life; he makes the world livable by traveling through global transportation systems.
We spread our personal gene code everywhere we go, like the old Peanuts cartoon character “Swineherd” who walked around with a cloud of dust around him – except that our dust is the most densely packed information in the known universe.
Supposedly, our entire genome could be rebuilt from invisible particles that fly from our skin and breath, as if we shared copies of our biography wherever we went – a biography so rich in information that if it were printed in 130 volumes, then it will take 95 years to read it.
Cambrian giant
Remember when fossil hunters discovered Marble Canyon in Canada, a fossil stratum that surpassed the Burgess Shale in both extent and richness of species? Scientists have discovered another amazing fossil there: a giant predator unlike anything seen before.
Named Titanokorys gainesi by the Royal Ontario Museum, it is half a meter long, almost as long as the famous Anomalocaris.
“The size of this animal is simply amazing, it is one of the largest Cambrian animals ever found,” says Jean-Bernard Caron, curator of invertebrate paleontology for Richard M. Evie of ROM.
Like Anomalocaris, it has the serrated round mouth characteristic of radiodonts (round teeth). And like all Cambrian animals, there is no evidence of transitional forms. The Titanocoris had a large carapace over its soft parts, including a huge head and a set of complex organs.
Like all radiodonts, Titanokorys had multifaceted eyes, a mouth shaped like a pineapple wedge with teeth, a pair of spiky claws under the head for grasping prey, and a body with a series of flaps for swimming.
DNA cable call
Proteins communicate over long distances through DNA . This could provide new theories about how proteins activate genes, contrary to the old “central dogma” that taught one-way communication from DNA to protein.
Proteins can communicate via DNA, having a dialogue at a distance, which serves as a kind of genetic “switch” , according to researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
They found that the binding of proteins to one region of the DNA molecule can physically affect another region located at a distant location, and this “equals effect” activates certain genes.
This effect has previously been observed in artificial systems, but Weizmann’s research has shown for the first time that it occurs in the DNA of living organisms.
The research is also linked to the interesting discovery of horizontal gene transfer occurring in DNA libraries in soil (see “Non-Mendelian inheritance undermines neo-Darwinism”).
A team from the Weizmann Institute of Science was studying how some bacteria can “enrich their genomes by borrowing segments of bacterial genes scattered in the soil around them” when they tapped into a long-distance DNA “talk”.
When two copies of a transcription factor called ComK bind to DNA, they send a signal down the “wire” that facilitates ComK binding at another distant binding site. Activation of all four copies exceeds a threshold level, “including the ability of the bacterium to kill genes.”
“We were surprised to find that DNA, in addition to containing the genetic code, acts as a communication cable, passing information over relatively long distances from one protein binding site to another,” says Rosenblum.
What is the physical mechanism of such information transfer? They suggest that this may be due to the tension of the double helix. It is possible, however, that this is just a carrier signal over which information of a higher level is transmitted.
They found that the regions must be at a certain distance from each other and have the same orientation, but the intermediate sequence of DNA letters has little effect. Perhaps this finding will open up more functions in the so-called “junk” DNA.
“Large distance communication within the DNA molecule is a new type of regulatory mechanism that opens up previously unavailable methods for constructing the genetic circuits of the future,” says Hofmann.
In their paper in the journal Nature Communications, Rosenblum et al. dispensed with the necessary Darwinian formalities.
“The question of whether natural promoters have evolved to efficiently transmit allosteric signals across many nanometers remains unclear,” they say. Perhaps this is not clear, because Darwinism puts on constants.
A shared code, another Cambrian giant, and DNA communication all fit within the expectations of intelligent design and challenge conventional Darwinism.
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