Under the Microscope: What a Tiny Bacteria Reveals About Creation
This question puzzles researchers who lack belief in a Creator: How does such a cell come into existence? There are creatures made of just a single cell, like bacteria, yet their creation remains a mystery.
The life of every living being on earth is composed of cells. Every creature's body is made up of an enormous number of cells, each teeming with life. A cell is an incredibly sophisticated system, far more advanced than supercomputers, aircraft, or spaceships. This question troubles researchers who don't believe in a Creator: How is such a cell created? There exist organisms composed of only a single cell, a unicellular organism, a bacterium. But again, how is such an organism formed?
Bacteria are, of course, very sophisticated organisms by virtue of being living cells. They replicate and can produce copies of themselves, and each copy also creates a copy. No computer today can manufacture computers independently, multiplying into millions in a short time. Bacteria develop resistance to attacking chemicals. Imagine a plastic computer that 'discovers' that the room temperature is rising, rendering the plastic ineffective, and then begins to produce new computers from metal to withstand the heat. How does a living cell form?
Within a living cell lies an enormous amount of information, concentrated in DNA spirals. DNA acts as production instructions. DNA has been mapped out, allowing us to replicate its coded information, yet most of this content remains incomprehensible. Is it superfluous?
Biologist Craig Venter sought to determine whether a living cell absolutely requires all the DNA content to form. He took a bacterium and 'deleted' information from its DNA. He didn’t remove the data linked to known systems in the cell but what appeared to be superfluous. Using an extremely precise laser, he destroyed parts of the information to see which data was truly needed for cell production and what was termed by research as 'junk DNA.'
For the experiment, Venter selected the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides, commonly found in cattle digestive systems. This bacterium is among the simplest known, containing only 517 genes written in 580,000 DNA letters. In comparison, the human cell is estimated to contain about 20,000 genes inscribed in three billion DNA letters.
It turns out there are some genes the bacterium can live without, but they are very few, fewer than forty. All the rest are crucial for existence; without them, the bacterium vanishes (not that the others don't contribute, just that they aren’t essential for life itself). Fascinatingly, a third of the genes critical to the bacterium's life are of unknown function to us. Despite our advances, our understanding remains quite limited.
"That finding was astonishing," Venter recalled. "We assumed we wouldn’t know the function of 5-10 percent of the genes. But it never occurred to us that we would be clueless about what a third of the genes in the simplest living cell do."
It turns out there is no 'simple' living cell. The critical mass necessary for the existence of a tiny bacterium involves an enormous amount of information—hundreds of thousands of letters—impossible to arise by mere chance. The living cell testifies to the Creator, and all our extensive modern knowledge only reinforces this fact.
