Reading time: ~2 min read
When a cell divides, errors sometimes arise as the chromosomes replicate themselves. To prevent errors in the genetic data accumulating in subsequent generations, every living thing possesses a mechanism that identifies and corrects the great majority of these errors. Did this mechanism not exist, the genetic structure of living things would soon become impaired, and extinction would be the eventual result.
The cell also works as an editor to reduce the number of such errors, though one or two are an acceptable level. Thanks to this control mechanism, a very small level of error –between one in a billion and one in a hundred billion– remains. One error in 100 billion is the equivalent of one mistake in a text of 50 million pages. It would take 100 professional layout staff, working non-stop for their entire lives, to produce 50 million pages.91 The nuclear physicist Gerald L. Schroeder describes the intellect displayed in the quality control system in the cell:
The cleverness of the system is subtle. Not just how it learned to get a protein to open the helix, or how DNA-P is made and then knows to come on the scene, or how it finds and joins the correct base. Those acts in themselves are near wizardry and plead for explanation. The cleverness here is that each new strand winds helically with the parent from which it was, as a complement, copied. Brilliant! Now quality control proteins can check the new work directly against the original template, the parent strand. Had the two new strands wound about each other, new to new, and the two parent strands reformed their original helix, the quality control would have been a far more difficult and far less efficient task.92
The astonishingly intelligent and precautionary events take place in DNA and in all the systems that work under its instructions cannot possibly be accounted for in terms of chance. These are programmed in an ordered manner that can be explained only by the existence of a Creator, the possessor of the knowledge of all things and the Lord of all things. That Creator is Almighty Allah, Who endows us with life By His mercy, and Whose knowledge enfolds all things.
