DNA Repair and the Choices We All Must Make

When you repair a broken pipe, shattered window or cracked sidewalk, you first remove the broken pieces and establish a starting point. Likewise when a break occurs in DNA, the automatic repair machines must first remove the broken, dangling molecules and establish a starting point. It is another fantastic capability of the cell’s DNA repair kit.

Your genome is under constant attack. Radiation and carcinogens from the outside and even the cell’s own chemicals can damage and break the flimsy DNA molecule. When only one of the strands of the double helix breaks, the repair job can take advantage of the complementary strand. Just as DNA is replicated by using one strand as a template, so too the repair job can rebuild the broken DNA by using the unbroken, complementary strand.

But when both DNA strands break the repair job is much more difficult. Like a bridge that has lost a section in an earthquake, you now have two DNA helices floating freely which need to be rejoined. And like the bridge which has broken rebar and chunks of cement dangling off the edge which need to be cleared, the DNA helices have pieces of broken nucleotides which need to be removed.

A repair job begins by cleaning away the damage. And so the proteins that repair DNA breaks begin by cleaning up the damaged site. They first remove the pieces of the broken nucleotides. New research is showing that the protein that so efficiently searches and identifies DNA breaks also performs this clean up job.

This research adds to the other wonders of the cell’s DNA repair kit, such as discussed here, here and here, which make no sense on evolution. The problem is DNA (and RNA) repair is at once complex and necessary. And so we must imagine that evolution created such capabilities very early in the history of life.

And imagine they do. Evolutionists imagine a gradual build up of capability, or they imagine early proteins that were far more versatile. These ancient proteins handled many tasks and, as luck would have it, RNA and DNA repair was one of them.

But there is no avoiding the fact that evolution fails to provide a plausible explanation for how random mutations just happened to create fantastic machines. In this case—as is often the case—the problem is aggravated by the fact that the astonishing complexity had to arise fast and early in the history of life. In fact, in this case, evolution must have been astonishingly fast since most life forms that we know of require these repair kits.

It is not that these DNA repair kits, or the myriad other empirical evidences from biology, by themselves falsify evolution. Such a feat is elusive given evolution’s low specificity and high malleability. Indeed, natural selection has produced a modern creation narrative—the theory of evolution—which is as hardy as any virus. But the narrative does not comport with reality.

Evolution is required to satisfy our metaphysics. Even the mere questioning of evolution immediately raises the specter of those unthinkables. Evolution must be true.

But on the physical evidence, evolution makes no sense. There may be test tubes and Bunsen burners in the laboratories, but believe me, this is all about metaphysics.

Each of us must make a choice and our decision has consequences. We can follow the evidence, or we can follow the dogma. Evolutionists have made their choice. Religion drives science, and it matters.