for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
Psalm 139:14
"Each of us carries information in our body that describes us, like engineers’ specifications describe a jumbo jet. It determines that we will be human beings, rather than cabbages or crocodiles, and also whether we will have blue eyes, short nose, long legs, etc. When a sperm fertilizes an egg, all the information that specifies how the person will be built (ignoring environmental factors such as exercise and diet) is already present.
Most of this information is in coded form in our DNA. To illustrate coding, a piece of string with beads on it can carry a message in
Morse code. The piece of string, by the use of a simple sequence of short beads, long beads, and spaces (to represent the dots and dashes of Morse code), can carry the same information as the English word ‘help’ typed on a sheet of paper. The entire Bible could be written thus in Morse code on a long enough piece of string.
In a similar way, the human blueprint is written in a code (or language convention) which is carried on very long chemical strings called DNA.
--This is by far the most efficient information storage system known, surpassing any foreseeable computer technology. --
This information is copied (and reshuffled) from generation to generation as people reproduce.
The word ‘gene’ refers to a small part of that information that carries the instructions for only one type of enzyme, for example.
A simple way of understanding it is as a small portion of the ‘message string,’ with only one specification on it.
For example, there is a gene that carries the instructions for making α-hemoglobin, one of the proteins involved in carrying oxygen in your red blood cells. If that gene has been damaged by mutation (such as when there is a copying mistake during reproduction), the instructions will be faulty, so it will make a crippled form of α-hemoglobin, if any. (Diseases such as sickle-cell anaemia and thalassaemia result from such mistakes.)
So, with an egg that has just been fertilized—where does all its information, its genes, come from? One half comes from the father (carried in the sperm), and the other half from the mother (carried in the egg).
Genes come in pairs, so in the case of hemoglobin, for example, we have two sets of code (instructions) for hemoglobin manufacture, one coming from the mother and one from the father. This is a very useful arrangement, because if you inherit a damaged gene from one parent that could instruct your cells to produce a defective hemoglobin molecule, you are likely to get a normal one from the other parent which will continue to give the right instructions. Thus only half the hemoglobin in your body will be defective. (In fact, each of us carries hundreds of mistakes, inherited from one or the other of our parents, which are usefully covered up by being matched with a normal gene from the other parent.)."
CMI
