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It Is Written Canada

Designed With Purpose

Chris Holland

Water

It’s All Just a Bunch of Gas

It’s All About the Genes

God's book, the Bible, still relevant in today's complex world.

It is written, sharing messages of hope around the world.

Thank you so much for choosing to watch It Is Written.

We are in the third part of a three-part series designed with purpose.

Did you know that every cell starts out with long strands of deoxyribonucleic acid?

Now, we more commonly call this huge molecule DNA.

It is essential for life to exist as it serves as kind of a chemical paper on which the plans for all our proteins as well as much of the other information necessary for our bodies to exist.

That information is divided into units called genes.

And if that sounded confusing to you, here to help us sort it all out and help us understand it and its implications for our faith is Dr.

Standish, thank you so much for joining us.

Well, thank you so much for having me and I am excited to talk about genes.

Standish, we've had a number of times together.

We've actually known each other for quite a while.

We met 20 years ago at Andrews University where you were an associate professor of biology and I was a student studying theology.

And your career has taken you far and wide in many different places.

You, before coming to Andrews, you were an associate professor of biology at Union College there in Lincoln, Nebraska.

You have a PhD in Environmental Biology and Public Policy, a Master's of Biology, and a Bachelor's of Science in Zoology.

And now you're the Senior Scientist at the Geoscience Research Institute.

And that sounded really big and confusing.

And so unraveling this confusion, before we unravel the DNA confusion, let's kind of unravel that confusion that I all talked about.

Yeah, sometimes I don't think I know what I do.

But I listen to my wife and then I know immediately.

Now, I work for the Geoscience Research Institute and this is an institute located in Southern California.

We're interested in how the Bible and the information that's recorded in there and science interact with 1 another.

Most of the time they're in complete agreement.

Sometimes there's some tension between the claims of science and the record of scripture.

And that's where we think, you know what, there's something interesting to find out there.

And so you spend a lot of time researching, exploring these tensions, finding ways in which these tensions can either be explained or actually, maybe they're not even a tension, or maybe this tension is actually a complementary and intentional tension.

Somebody wanted to read more about the things that the Geoscience Research Institute is doing, if someone wanted to read maybe some of the research papers that you have written, where could they find that information?

The best place to start would be at the Geoscience Research Institute website, which is just grisda.org.

Stanish, we opened the show talking about DNA.

So that means that it's a structure that's made up of lots of atoms all joined together.

Now, most molecules are very small relative to the scale of things that we deal with.

You can't see molecules typically with the naked eye.

But DNA has 2 really interesting properties, just on a global scale.

First of all, it is really a big molecule.

That doesn't mean that you can necessarily see it with your naked eye.

You have in pretty much all of your cells 46 chromosomes.

And the DNA is a major component of those chromosomes.

If you just took the DNA from those chromosomes, so that's all 46 of them, and stretched it out straight, it would be about 6 feet, a little over 6 feet, approximately 2 meters long.

So my DNA, if I just sort of lined it up, all those bits of DNA inside my cells would be about as tall as I am when I'm standing up.

So, and just to make sure I understand correctly, is it the DNA in all of your cells or the DNA in just 1 cell that is about 2 meters long?

And we have lots of cells throughout our body.

So you're talking, if you took all the DNA that's inside of us, You're talking about something that's huge.

Oh yes, you have something on the order of approaching a trillion human cells in your body.

And so yeah, there's a lot of DNA in there, at least in terms of length.

Wow, so you're talking about almost 2000000000000 meters of length in just 1 human body.

So let's talk a little bit more about this DNA.

The information is probably the most interesting thing about the DNA.

I mean, the structure of DNA itself is very elegant and beautiful.

It's that sort of double helical twisting structure that you see showing up when people wanna talk about science kind of things.

They frequently have a picture of DNA in there.

And finding that structure was a very, very big deal.

In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick, along with a couple of other people, but they've been the big sort of movers and shakers with this, they published a paper that got them this Nobel Prize in nature.

Interestingly enough, the paper itself is only about a page long, but it reported this double helical structure.

In terms of recording the information or storing the information in there, you can think of the DNA language as being spelled out in just the same way that we spell out words ourselves.

Instead of using letters, it uses slightly different flat molecules that are attached to the, So what sticks into the middle of that sort of twisted ladder structure, those are the parts of the molecule that contain the information.

And each 1 of those is like a different letter.

There are only 4 different letters in the DNA alphabet.

So we frequently symbolize them as ATG, and C.

And I know when I first saw that I thought, wow, How can you spell very much using only that many letters?

And so, the key to DNA is that it encodes information, holds information.

And it's a very good molecule for doing that.

Yes, why is it such a good molecule for doing that?

I mean, how does it get that information?

Okay, let's first talk Just a little bit about why it's a really good molecule for storing information.

But it's pretty amazing for such a huge molecule.

And because it's so stable, it actually stays around for a long time.

You can find DNA in samples of bone, let's say, that's thousands of years old.

Back to Menu

Series

Designed With Purpose

It’s All About the Genes

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Lost

Lost Sheep

29m

Where Am I From?

Where Am I From?- Part 1

29m

Not Guilty

28m

Noah, The Real Story

Noah, The Real Story- God’s Grace

29m

Depression, A Way Out

Stress and Anxiety

29m

Who Was Desmond Doss?

28m

I Shall Return

28m

Is Heaven For Real?

6. Is Heaven For Real?- What About Hell #1

29m

The Seven Churches

The Seven Churches of Revelation: Ephesus

28m

Prequel of the Bible: The Selfishness Paradigm

28m

Star Wars

2. Hope Rises

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Is Heaven For Real?

2. Is Heaven For Real?- When Do We Get There #1

29m

Sound Doctrine