Holmes, I have a sore neck....

Another wonder of the world is genetics.

Genetics appears to be the science of studying the very building blocks of life.

It involves this: all living things are made up of stuff called DNA. DNA is just an abbreviation for a very long molecule (molecule = collection of atoms), called De-oxy ribo-nucleic acid. The wonderful thing about DNA is basically that all DNA is quite similar.

DNA is made of only four different types of smaller molecule (Cytosine, Guanine, Thymine and Adenine, or C, G, T and A, called "bases") and it is the way these are combined that make each bit of DNA different.

Surprising thing is, the DNA is just like a line of these, all in a row, and it is the order of these four that determines what the DNA does. Trouble is, the DNA is very long, miles long, in fact if a hyperbole is needed.

So what's with this DNA? Well, it is just an ordinary molecule, except that it is very long.

One more thing, and this is the good bit, the scientists found that DNA could make other molecules of DNA, all by itself.


How can that be? I can hear the reader ask. Good question, I must say, because if a molecule is going to make another molecule, it could be anything and indeed, if statistics are anything to go by, physics says it WOULD be anything.

However, DNA is very special, in that the molecules it makes are exact copies of the sequence of bases it uses itself. In other words, DNA make copies of itself, the exact copy.

This is why things grow, because the "lifeform" makes more DNA for itself to add on to the original.

The Big Question is: why does DNA make a copy of itself and not some other useless molecule, and how does it do it?

This is a question asked by scientists ever since we discovered that DNA was the molecule of life.

The answer was provided by scientists Watson and Crick in the 1950's.

It was a code!.

What happens is this: The DNA sequence makes another molecule called an enzyme, and this enzyme gathers the correct bases to stick to one half of the DNA, which is divided into two. The whole process creates two molecules of DNA, which are exact copies of one another.

So how does the DNA know which enzyme to make? Simple, a code!

The sequence of the bases in any DNA molecule is a code to create the correct enzyme that enables a copy to be made.

Wait a minute! A code? Aren't codes a thing of design?

Hmmmm.

Here's us scientists thinking that evolution brought about all life by chance! But if that were so, how come a code got in there?

Maybe, just maybe, there is a designer after all, and the world have been calling HIM names from antiquity, names like Yahweh, Brahmin, Buddha, Allah without knowing why.

Makes you think, does it not?