Christmas tree lights v. DNA

December 27, 2010 by Dr. Mc.

How do you take down Christmas tree lights? I’ve been doing it for years. You’d think I would have come up with a system sooner than this, but it just dawned on me! After first getting all the ornaments off (my first rule, discovery early in my un-decorating career), I usually just started looking around the tree for an end and then started rolling each strand up on a piece of cardboard (my last innovation, several years ago). But then I would find that as I rolled up a strand, it was tangled with other strands, and I’d be weaving them in and out of each other, or laying that one aside and finding another end to begin again. My new discovery is that if I go to the wall outlet where all the strands are plugged in, the plug at the top of the stack, the one farthest from the wall outlet, is the last one strung, and therefore is the one that lies on top of all the other strands that it crosses! Duh! Now I have three steps: remove ornaments, begin with the strand plugged in last, and roll from the wall outlet onto a square of cardboard.
While rolling the lights back onto the cardboard squares for storage, I began thinking about how easily tangles occur, if you just role one strand out of order. Then I began thinking about DNA and how it is coiled for storage. The process is inconceivably fast and accurate, with coil upon coil upon coil, and yet organelles inside each cell are capable of finding just the right portion of the coil, accessing it, duplicating it for reproduction or converting it to RNA for manufacturing a protein, and then returning it to exactly the right place, where it can be retrieved again later, with incredibly few mishaps.
Check out this website. Scroll down to the video and watch the first portion, which illustrates the coiling process. Now, I ask you: which is more complex, DNA coiling, or Christmas tree light rolling? Now, is there likely to randomly occur a machine to quickly and accurately uncoil and then re-hang Christmas tree lights? I don’t think so, and I’m quite confident that millions of years wouldn’t help. Why would anyone believe that DNA coiling is done by an organelle that occurred through random chance before being “naturally selected” in Darwinian evolution? That takes more faith than I’ve got. Watch the rest of the video, and remember that the entire process has to work before any organism can even be there for natural selection to select. Have a happy New Year, and keep thinking.

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