Via basic nucleotide chemistry (stipulate that it exists) DNA is read as, thus consists of, triplets. Each triplet consists of three nucleotides, and each nucleotide can be one of A C G and T. Starting at AAA and going on to AAC AAG AAT ACA ACC ACG ACT AGA AGC AGG AGT (, , whew) by the time you get to TTT you’ve got 64 different combinations. (Do try this at home. 😉 )
Out of those, AUG is a “punctuation” that says “start.” In mid-gene it codes for methionine. All 64 combinations do something. Three—UAA, UAG, UGA—mean “stop.” The other 61 triplets each indicate one of the twenty amino acids that are used in forming a protein. Most of the 20 amino acids have multiple codings. The total string of triplets, from AUG to one of the ‘end’ triplets, is a gene. When activated, that gene is the recipe for a protein. “Activated” means that the gene is read, sequentially, and each amino acid a triplet codes for gets strung onto the developing protein in that order. When the gene transcription process hits a “stop” the protein is complete. At this point the construction machinery releases it to operate in whatever way it happens to work.
Now as to “information not being added to DNA” we have a contradiction in terms. DNA is information. You can surely add DNA to DNA, therefore you can surely “add information to DNA.”
Next time you hear someone distinguished repeat this idea about not being able to add information to DNA, kindly forgive them for wanting to prove the impossible, or at least to prove nonsense.
Forgive me droning on, but here is a factoid you might find intriguing. Human DNA is roughly 6 billion nucleotides long, or 2 billion triplets. The equivalent density of information is 12 billion binary bits; 6 binary bits will cover 26 upper case, 26 lower case, space, period, and the numbers 0 to 9. In short, every triplet is about the same as one letter on a page of print. Now look at two billion letters; that works out to roughly 300 million words, or 2 thousand novels of 150 thousand words each–a decent beach read, two thousand times.
That’s a lot of dead trees! 😉 When a human cell divides, the process of reading out and replicating all 2 billion triplets isn’t perfect. The mechanisms have clever error-check-and-correct capabilities built in, but by the time the second copy of those 2 billion triplets is complete, damage HAS happened. One unsuspected consequence is that no single cell in your body is likely to be have DNA identical to any other single cell! Scary, right? But GOD’s infinite wisdom has seen to it that our bodies keep on keeping on, anyway.
TO CONTINUE THE STORY: look at that second set of 2 thousand novels; a few dozen have one letter on one page that was copied wrong. When you read the two thousand copies, which is an entire lifetime of heavy beach reading, do you think you’ll notice the several dozen typos?
No. You won’t. But the flip side of that coin is that the inevitable small changes that unleash evolution are built in from the ground up. GOD is good, and He made evolution inevitable. He said, “Let there be light.” That was 13.8 billion years ago, and He revealed that fact to us “in the fullness of time” which means that when we read the Psalms now, they tell us to look into the heavens to see GOD’s unguessable majesty and glory, we understand, the universe is vast beyond our ability to understand, and a baker’s-dozen-odd years old.
To insist that GOD only used six thousand years? That diminishes GOD’s majesty and glory, and conflates humanity to a “world” consisting of a planet surrounded by lights. We’re very very much smaller than that: we’re inhabitants of a Universe. “What is man that you are mindful of him?” Indeed, what? GOD made what He made, and did that so that He would have homo sapiens, to love. and (forgive the buzz-word) have homo sapiens organically grown.
Three or four decades ago a sit-com called WKRP in Cincinnati used this tag-line: “Genuine plastic – accept no substitutes.” But GOD don’t make no plastic.
Oh, and Another Thing 