Chewing Gum unlocks DNA and Mathematical Codes
Lola, a young girl who lived in Denmark 5,700 years ago, had blue eyes, dark skin and dark hair. Her last meal included hazelnuts and mallard duck but no milk – she couldn’t stomach dairy. And the reason we know any of this is because she chewed on birch pitch, a material that functioned a bit like an ancient chewing gum. A study of that birch pitch has uncovered the girl’s entire genome and oral microbiome, marking the first time human genetic material has successfully been extracted from something besides human bones. The study published recently in the journal Nature Communications.
In the 1940’s, the eminent scientist Barbara McClintock damaged parts of the DNA in corn maize. To her amazement, the plants could reconstruct the damaged section. They did so by copying other parts of the DNA strand, then pasting them into the damaged area. This discovery was so radical at the time, hardly anyone believed her reports. (40 years later she won the Nobel Prize for this work.)
And we still wonder: How does a tiny cell possibly know how to do…. that???
Dr. Jean-Claude Perez, a French HIV researcher and computer scientist, has now found part of the answer. Hint:The instructions in DNA are not only linguistic, they’re beautifully mathematical. There is an Evolutionary Matrix that governs the structure of DNA.
Computers use something called a “checksum” to detect data errors. It turns out DNA uses checksums too. But DNA’s checksum is not only able to detect missing data; sometimes it can even calculate what’s missing. Here’s how it works.
In English, the letter E appears 12.7% of the time. The letter Z appears 0.7% of the time. The other letters fall somewhere in between. So it’s possible to detect data errors in English just by counting letters. In DNA, some letters also appear a lot more often (like E in English) and some much less often. But… unlike English, how often each letters appears in DNA is controlled by an exact mathematical formula that is hidden within the genetic code table. When cells replicate, they count the total number of letters in the DNA strand of the daughter cell. If the letter counts don’t match certain exact ratios, the cell knows that an error has been made. So it abandons the operation and kills the new cell.
Failure of this checksum mechanism causes birth defects and cancer.
Dr. Jean-Claude Perez started counting letters in DNA. He discovered that these ratios are highly mathematical and based on “Phi”, the Golden Ratio 1.618. This is a very special number, sort of like Pi.
DNA has four symbols, T, C, A and G. These symbols are grouped into letters made from combinations of 3 symbols, called triplets. There are 4x4x4=64 possible combinations. So the genetic alphabet has 64 letters. The 64 letters are used to write the instructions that make amino acids and proteins.
Perez somehow figured out that if he arranged the letters in DNA according to a T-C-A-G table, an interesting pattern appeared when he counted the letters. He took single stranded DNA of the human genome, which has 1 billion triplets. He counted the population of each triplet in the DNA and put the total in each slot. When he added up the letters, the ratio of total white letters to black letters was 1:1. And this turned out to not just be roughly true. It was exactly true, to better than one part in one thousand.
OK, so what does all this mean?
- Copying errors cannot be the source of evolutionary progress, because if that were true, eventually all the letters would be equally probable.
- This proves that useful evolutionary mutations are not random. Instead, they are controlled by a precise Evolutionary Matrix to within 0.1%
- When organisms exchange DNA with each other through Horizontal Gene Transfer, the end result still obeys specific mathematical patterns
- DNA is able to re-create destroyed data by computing checksums in reverse – like calculating the missing contents of a page ripped out of a novel.
No man-made language has this kind of precise mathematical structure. DNA is a tightly woven, highly efficient language that follows extremely specific rules. Its alphabet, grammar and overall structure are ordered by a beautiful set of mathematical functions.
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