Over the past forty years scientists in a wide variety of fields have been confronting a material world that is far, far more complex than previous generations had ever thought. This has created consternation amongst the materialists, whose only available engine to produce said complexity is chance working over billions and billions of years. The more complex the material world is discovered to be, the more difficult the materialists' cosmology is to sustain.
When life in its most basic forms (for example, at the level of single cells) is demonstrated to be horrendously complex, all sorts of questions are begged, such as where are the less complex mechanisms which produced this extreme complexity in the most primitive of life forms? The gap in the fossil record (which is damning enough) is nothing compared to the "gaps" at the micro-biological level required by the materialist cosmological theories.
And now, it has been discovered that the work of DNA--complex enough--is much, much more complex than initially thought. Add another trillion years or so on to the age of the cosmos in order for such complexity to evolve. What's a few trillion years amongst friends, huh?
Scientists find second, 'hidden' language in human genetic code
SEATTLE, Dec. 12 (UPI)
Breitbart News
U.S. geneticists say a second code hiding within DNA changes how scientists read its instructions and interpret mutations to make sense of health and disease. Since the genetic code was deciphered in the 1960s, scientists have assumed it was used exclusively to write information about proteins, but University of Washington scientists say they've discovered genomes use the genetic code to write two separate "languages."
One, long understood, describes how proteins are made, while the other instructs the cell on how genes are controlled. One language is written on top of the other, which is why the second language remained hidden for so long, a university release said Thursday.
"For over 40 years we have assumed that DNA changes affecting the genetic code solely impact how proteins are made," UW genome sciences Professor John Stamatoyannopoulos said. "Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture. These new findings highlight that DNA is an incredibly powerful information storage device, which nature has fully exploited in unexpected ways." [Note the personification of "nature" in the statement above in order to give the impression of intent, purpose, and design--something which materialism actually excludes from square one. See the next sentence which returns to the core assumption of materialism--matter and life exists only by virtue of random chance. Ed.]
Parts of the genetic code have two meanings, one related to protein sequence, and one related to gene control, the researchers said, and both apparently evolved in concert with each other. The gene control instructions appear to help stabilize certain beneficial features of proteins and how they are made, they said.
The discovery has major implications for how scientists and physicians interpret a patient's genome and could open new doors to the diagnosis and treatment of disease, Stamatoyannopoulos said. "The fact that the genetic code can simultaneously write two kinds of information means that many DNA changes that appear to alter protein sequences may actually cause disease by disrupting gene control programs or even both mechanisms simultaneously," he said.
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