Chapter 1 ~ Why your life is important

It is a beautiful spring day when I start writing down this story for you. I am in our garden, surrounded by flowers in full bloom and butterflies flying from one flower to the next. One of them lands on a large, yellow flower and feeds on the nectar. Carefully, I walk towards it and look at the butterfly up close. I am amazed at the beautiful shape and colours. When it has finished, it flies off with a thick layer of pollen on its body. Its journey continues to another flower.

Did you know there are about 400,000 different varieties of flowers and plants on planet earth? Can you imagine? The variation between all the flowers I see amazes me every time. Each flower has beautiful colours and a unique shape.

Because all the differences amazed me, I started studying nature. Those differences are wonderful, but what makes plants, animals and humans live, is even more amazing.

Our body is a great miracle

Have you ever bought a do-it-yourself kit? A bookcase for example. The kit contains a lot of shelves, screws and a manual. Your body is a little like that. It exists of billions of cells and every cell contains a manual for your entire body. This manual is called DNA – a blueprint of your body. Your DNA makes you look the way you do.

Even the first cell with which your life began already had this complete blueprint. Your DNA specifies how your body is constructed – head, arms, legs, your eye colour and the shape of your nose. But it also determines how your organs and limbs work together. Isn’t that amazing?

So DNA is the manual of your body. It is a bit like the code of computer software. This code is needed for your computer to function correctly. It makes it possible to surf the internet on your computer, or write a letter.

Researchers discovered that if you were to write down human DNA [1] in a book, you would need more than 1 million pages! That is more than 2,500 large volumes. And this code is stored in every cell of your body [2].

Did life start by accident?

Many scientists believe that life on earth started by accident. They think that it was caused by a series of small steps and chemical processes. But more and more scientists realise that DNA is so complex that it cannot have originated from a series of accidental chemical reactions.

Let us think again about computer software. It is not very likely you are a computer programmer, so you probably did not know that the DNA in one human cell is just as complex as Windows computer software. Do you think it is likely that complex computer software like Windows came into being by a series of coincidences? This program contains about just as many instructions (code) as the human DNA [3] Windows was created by thousands of computer programmers who  worked on it for years and years.

There is no code without a design. No computer software came into being by accident, without a design and without programmers working on it. If our DNA is as complex as computer software, could humans have come into being by accident?

[1] Human genome height (English)

[2] National Geographic – How Many Cells in Your Body (English)

[3] Lines of Code in Windows 10 , Souce code length (English)

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