Part 1 of this blog described the amazing amount of expertly-designed digital information that is held within the human body. Part 2 outlines the existence of multiple forms of human data and their embedded communication processes, all working together to allow a human body to adapt to different environments.
More Than One Form of Data
There is much still to be discovered about the way genes function in the body, and the field of epigenetics is a rapidly growing area. Epigenetics is the study of biological mechanisms that change the way genes are expressed. These mechanisms respond to certain circumstances in life by causing specific genes to become dormant or active. As McGill University epigenetics pioneer Moshe Szyf comments in this extract from Febish and Oxley’s book Food for Thought: An Epigenetic Guide to Wellness, “Epigenetics introduces the concept of free will into our idea of genetics”[1]. In other words, where we live and how we live will affect the way that our fixed, inherited, gene set functions. He further compares DNA to a computer’s hardware, epigenetics to its software, and the environment to data for the software.
Epigenetic Communication
Since the epigenome is independent of DNA, this adds a further dimension to the information held within human cells. It would appear that this bank of human information at the cellular level is so powerful, and has such an efficient communications system, that it can correct itself when needed, and can manage the interaction between separate databases in response to changing environments and conditions external to the body. Febish and Oxley describe a form of epigenetic communication between cells:
Our cells, through epigenetics, can send signals in our bodies that will throw ON/OFF gene switches within a cell, between neighboring cells and between distant cells. Neighboring cells can communicate via direct connect (touching each other) with each other like a handshake. Nearby cells can communicate by passing signals back and forth like throwing a ball in a game of catch. Some signals, like stress, send out broadcasts like a radio or TV signal. These broadcasts affect large number of cells throughout the body. Stress signals the body to prepare for an event. Different cells do different things to prepare. The signal stops and things return to normal when the stressful event ends.[2]
From Disorder to Order
Opponents of Intelligent Design believe that the assembly of this amazing amount of structured information that forms the human body all happened as a result of the accumulation of random, unguided processes over a very long period of time. However, this movement from disorder to order is completely at odds with the second law of thermodynamics, which indicates that any system left to its own devices will naturally decay over time, rather than spontaneously organizing itself in this way. Further, if we developed on the “survival of the fittest” basis, it would have been necessary for all of the various conditions that our epigenome can adapt to, to have been encountered, and remembered, during the human body’s earlier development. An intelligent designer, however, who lives outside of time and could see the whole of mankind’s existence from start to finish, would be able to “design in” the ability to cope with all that we might encounter, including environments that we have not yet seen.
[1]George J. Febish and Jo Anne Oxley, Food For Thought: An Epigenetic Guide to Wellness, (Bloomington, IN, Xlibris, 2011) Kindle edition, Kindle location 534.
[2]Ibid., Kindle location 600.
An Engineer Finds Faith 