Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

DNA Repair With a Molecular Tool

Cornelius Hunter
April 14, 2010
Intelligent Design
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The threats to the DNA in our cells are incredible. Radiation, carcinogens and even chemicals produced within the cell attack the DNA thousands of time every day. What is more incredible though is the cell’s DNA repair system, which you can read more about here and here. The worst kind of DNA damage is the so-called double-strand break where both strands of the double helix break. In response the cell mounts a swift and sophisticated response which new research is helping to elucidate.  Read more
Comments
Obviously this repair kit wouldn’t work without the CtIP protein. But it also wouldn’t work without the chemical signal that opens it up. Remove either one and the repair kit doesn’t work very well. Of course CtIP needs to have a binding site for the chemical signal, and CtIP needs to undergo just the right conformational change under the influence of the binding. This is only the beginning of the repair kit’s complexity. There are several more important players in the choreography, without which the repair job would suffer.
This answers Darwin's challenge to the negative:
"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." Charles Darwin
This is the classic Chicken or Egg Paradox. Without these repair mechanisms, there is no life. Without life there is no repair mechanism. Thus life had to appear with repair mechanisms in place. And if it appeared with repair mechanisms in place, then it wasn't evolved via Darwinian processes. SUDDEN EMERGENCE is the most reasonable account. Whether one wishes to invoke ID or special creation is formally a separate question, but with respect to Darwinian gradualism, it would appear Darwinian process are falsified for the case of these repair mechanism. One could of course speculate a Darwinian pathway, but that is a speculation, not empirical science.scordova
April 14, 2010
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