This morning on NPR, I listened to a story about scientists who managed to store Shakespearean sonnets by encoding them into DNA. I came up with this idea myself back in 2005, and I can prove it. It shows that there are no original ideas really. Like most scientific studies, they are shared by multiple people who all come to the same idea different ways. Perhaps this group was able to accomplish it because they had money to back them whereas I had simply an interest in cryptology and the use of DNA to communicate other messages besides which amino acid to attach in a protein.
I postulate that this is not a new thing that we have discovered. Perhaps our noncoding sequences contain all the information the human race will ever discover or need ala the crystals sent by Jorell from Krypton. If so, our Creator may have programmed into us the sum total of human knowledge or His knowledge so that we have it in us. In any case, we know that it codes for something, and as such it is a form of communication even if its cryptograms are not letters from the alphabet.
We know quite a bit about noncoding regions. One of my interests in graduate school was in gene promoter regions, which are basically the equivalent of DNA’s mission control, that tell cells how to use DNA, when to use it, how much to use when it’s needed, and may contain information catching a ride or left behind by other organisms. Why not information left behind by our Creator? McClintok identified transposons, and more recently we learned about how retroviruses like HIV can hide inside your DNA and either deliver genes or steal them. In fact, that’s one way in which bacteria become resistant to antibiotics; they pick up antibiotic resistance genes from viruses that can invade but not destroy them. Maybe all of our genes are actually God’s entire repository of knowledge put into every person. We know that most of our brain is not actively in use, and the same can be said of our human genome which, despite being much larger than that of other organisms, in some cases contains fewer actively transcribed regions called genes. Perhaps the God gene is not about conferring an ability to believe in Him but rather makes it more likely that we will.
I have been saying for a long time that there are no new ideas but rather new ways of expressing things we already know. If our DNA already contains information like these researchers have copied, then that is a true statement. We have that knowledge, all knowledge, already but don’t know how to use it or don’t even use it when we find out how. Some people may have figured it out, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that when God inspires man all He really does is show us how to use what He already gave us. This would explain how men like Lincoln or Moses or Pasteur or women like Curie, Shelly or Joan of Arc arose when they did. They were born when they needed to be, and God inspired them to use what was in them specifically to solve the problem of their time. This would explain that Beethoven already had it in him to compose that music. Despite being deaf, he was able to access the data stored in his noncoding sequences. The power and the information are already in us.
God already gave us everything He had if DNA codes more than just the information for biological sustenance. Every single human ever born may already contain, if God used this same process, the total sum of God’s knowledge, power, and potential. In that case, the main condition required in order to have everything God has becomes then that a man be born a mortal and obtain DNA. We don’t know how to use it yet, but now we have it, which may be why resurrection is so crucial, because we will still need the DNA after we finish our probation. Combine that with the notion that God made man in His own image, male and female, and we find a microcosm for coupled and matched chromosomes as well as an argument for marriage as man and woman, but I digress. That is the only way to pass on the information and propagate the species. Even then, a perfectly working organism on its own is not possible, because we are split into genders, thus requiring man and woman to come together in order to achieve perfection, albeit after this life. Each of us only uses half of our genetic complement, and men and women balance each other out, which is also a pattern observed in the cosmos.
If men can figure out how to store information in DNA, it is easy to assume that other more developed organisms could and did. Humans become therefore the perfect library, perpetuating the continuity of all the repository of human knowledge in their biology and chemistry even when parts of their society are annihilated. We are a self-perpetuating, self-maintaining storage facility, and if this postulate holds, we become a sort of artificial intelligence because our knowledge and wisdom and intuition come from chemistry and physics made manifest through a biological lens in our behavior. This also gives credit to the notion other organisms besides humans may be sentient, including ANYTHING that has DNA. These are things taught by my Faith but never fully explained to my satisfaction.
Before you get emotional about this, consider that this is just a variegated notion on a common science fiction theme. The Alien series, Avatar, Contact, and scores of other movies and TV series, including Star Trek, addressed the possibility that we were put here on purpose by a higher power, that they made us and that we are using what they gave us to improve. How does something faulty become better on its own? IT learns to use what it already has better than it ever did before. We are learning to use what we already have better than ever before and making use of what the universe provides to make useful work for us and our Maker.
The researchers comment on the cost of this storage medium as well. There is a great cost to using this great gift well and wisely. If indeed every human has the sum of God’s knowledge, skills, and abilities, that increases the obligation we have to use it well and wisely and explains His wrath when we disobey. It also supports CS Lewis’ belief that if you take away all that is good in man, you are not left with a bad man but with nothing at all. Take away all the good stuff stored in our DNA, and you are left with no code, no letters, no useful work at all, only junk or gobbledygook. Time will tell what we can make of this. It is an interesting notion that if we can store it outside us that some Higher Providence might have already stored all that information inside of us, and inside every single one of us. That sounds like just another way in which we are created equal.
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