Hachimoji DNA and Evolution

Scientists have been tinkering with the Creator's handiwork, but that is what a lot of them do; I think it is just part of human nature. Proponents of universal common ancestor evolution have been manipulating DNA as if it was a new bendable action figure.

Base pairings in hachimoji DNA (left, dR = deoxyribose) and hachimoji RNA (right, R = ribose).
The natural bases are in the upper row; the unnatural, synthetic bases are in the lower row.
Hydrogen bonds are dashed green lines, with acceptor atoms in red.
Caption credit: Wikipedia, image credit: Wikimedia Commons / WolfmanSF (CC by-SA 4.0)

Of course, when secularists ignore God, they make their own rules and come up with viperine philosophies like genetic determinism and eugenics, and so on. Indeed, naturalists make their own ethics regarding scientific advances that fit dystopian science fiction stories. They make chimeras through DNA tampering while ignoring not only ethical concerns, but the fact that DNA demonstrates the work of the Master Engineer: it contains information.

Researchers hatched up hachimoji DNA by doubling the letters of the real thing. Through logic that only works in the secularist mind, they are saying (with the help of the lapdog media in the secular science industry) that maybe life evolved somewhere with this configuration. There are a couple of problems.

Let me retell an old story to help emphasize a point:

A group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God. They elected one scientist to go and tell God that he was now irrelevant.

The scientist walked up to God the Son and said, “God, we've decided that we no longer need you. We’re can clone people and do many other things that seem miraculous, so why don’t you just go on and leave us alone?”

God listened patiently and then said, “All right, how about if we have a man-making contest?”

The scientist said, “Okay, we can do that!”

“But,” God added, “we’re going to do this just like I did when I made Adam.”

The scientist said, “You got it”, and bent down and grabbed a handful of dirt.

Jesus (Col. 1:16) looked at him and said, “Not so fast. Go get your own dirt.”

First, they are only proving that they can intelligently design something using existing materials and manipulating it with their knowledge and equipment — these tinhorns didn't get their own dirt. Second, the whole thing simply will not work with an eight-letter alphabet; it's not really good for anything. Ironically, they are actually supporting special creation!

A research group led by Dr Steven Benner at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution (FAME)5 in Alachua, Florida has created four extra DNA letters. They recently published a paper on their work in the prestigious journal Science6 and, as we have already seen, it caused a flurry of ‘tweets’ and re-postings. By tweaking the structure of the already-existing four bases, adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T), they have expanded the DNA alphabet from four to eight letters. The two extra pairs of letters include ‘S’ and ‘B’, and ‘P’ and ‘Z’. The researchers have named the resulting eight-letter alphabet “hachimoji”, which is Japanese for “eight” and “letter”.

. . .

These four new nucleotides are interesting, but they are not truly innovative. How about a pair of bases with four hydrogen bonds? Or a base with a steroid structure, like that of progesterone or testosterone? No, they are not pursuing radical new structures like these, because humans are better at copying and modifying existing things than they are at inventing brand new things from scratch. In the end, all of their work testifies to how much thought must go into the designing of any new ‘thing’. Despite the headlines, this argues against naturalistic evolution.

To read the entire article, click on "Hachimoji DNA argues against evolution, despite recent claims".