DNA: A wonderful library

Now let’s talk about something in our bodies that is too small to be seen. Scientists call it DNA. But first, let’s consider an example that will make it easier to understand what DNA is.

The subject of our example is letters and words.

abcdefghijklmnopqrsuvwxyz

House, car, garden, cat, flower, park, street.We know that words are made up of letters, but these letters certainly did not form words by themselves by chance. Let’s carry out an experiment and see what happens. Here are some small tags with a number or a letter written on each one. If you like, we can watch them for a long time. Do you think that these letters and numbers could ever come together and form a sensible sentence? Surely not. Let’s go a step further and throw the small tags on the floor at random. Could they form a meaningful sentence now? Never. However hard we may try, it is quite impossible. Imagine that we got tired of trying and left the room for ten minutes. When we came back and found a note saying, “Hi, how are you?”, what would we think?

We would know right away that these letters had not lined themselves up at random. It would be evident to us that someone had come and arranged them one by one to form a sensible statement.

This example shows us a law: whenever something has been written that has a meaning, someone must have written it. Now, let’s examine DNA with this law in mind.In the 20th century, scientists made some important discoveries. They found that the human body is made up of 100 trillion tiny cells. These cells are too small to be seen with the naked eye, but when we examine them under a microscope, we see something else quite amazing. In the center of each cell a plan has been written down that determines the character not only of the cell but of all the organs in the body. Scientists call this plan DNA. It is a long chain of molecules that resembles a ladder.

Actually, DNA is an alphabet composed of four letters- A, T, C and G.

A = Adenine; B = Thymine; C = Cytosine; G= Guanine

These are coded in such a way that the DNA of a single cell contains enough information to fill an encyclopedia a million pages long. Everything is written in it: the color of your eyes, the shape of your eyebrows, the color of your hair, the size of your nose, the color of your skin, the shape of your face and the properties of your cells. Did you notice? In the DNA of a single cell there is not just one letter, one sentence or one book; there is enough information contained in it to fill all the encyclopedias in a huge library. Scientists have calculated that the amount of DNA that could fit into a teaspoon would be able to contain all the information contained in every book that has ever been written in the world. Surely, such a marvelous structure cannot have come into existence by itself by chance. Just as a single written sentence proves to us that someone wrote it, so the encyclopedias full of knowledge contained in DNA prove to us without a doubt that Allah exists.