The latest challenge to Darwinian thinking from the hilarious Long Story Short series comes in a deceptively simple package, as they all do. The cute almost-stick figures look like a children’s cartoon. The humor is sarcastic: bacteria, for instance, are those “tiny danger hot dogs.” The scientific referencing is there, but in tiny type at the top of the screen that goes by so quickly that you have to hit pause in order to read it. Five PhD scientists served as consultants on the new episode about the origin of life, “Recognition, Recycling, & Repair,” but it wears its learning very lightly.

That’s the style, and these brief videos most recently led a Rutgers University biologist, Professor Dan Stern Cardinale (aka Dr. Dan), to think he could readily dismantle the last episode, on junk DNA, with a video of his own. As a result, Dr. Stern Cardinale ended up in a pretty weighty and technical YouTube debate, hosted by agnostic Steve McRae, with our own Dr. Casey Luskin, asking, “Is the Human Genome Largely Junk DNA?” It’s fair to say that Dr. Luskin ate Dr. Stern Cardinale’s lunch, both in the debate and in related posts and exchanges.

The Fix Is In

What such fun will come of the new offering from Long Story? The origin of life required sophisticated recognition, recycling, and repair mechanisms to deal with massive daily damage to DNA from a host of sources. Without them, all DNA would be junk DNA. But here’s the problem: the mechanisms to fix errors themselves require sophisticated DNA coding, which in turn required the mechanisms to keep it operating. The paradox was pointed out by Manfred Eigen, and no materialist theory of life’s origin has solved the riddle. Without intelligence and foresight, there’s no way that bird was going to get off the ground.

As Long Story acknowledges, illustrating from the wondrous work of ribosomes, some theorists assert that the problem is solved by imagining simpler life with simpler proto-ribosomes. However, “If we’re going to imagine that early life had something simpler than a ribosome, something more crude, less fancy, it would only be more prone to make errors and produce more junk.”

An Intelligent Being

The episode focuses on just one mechanism, base excision repair, a relatively elementary one — yet still immensely sophisticated. Such things refute any effort to explain them other than by means of intelligent design. Every materialist solution has its own defeater wrapped into it. As Long Story explains, “DNA was designed with the expectation that errors would happen. As well as the foresight to be able to be fixed. Blind forces, like Darwinian evolution, have no expectations. They have no foresight. Only intelligent beings do.” The origin of life must have occurred with the participation of such a being. 

Watch and enjoy, and consider that perhaps out there, watching along with you, is another Professor Dan Stern Cardinale who is imagining how easy it’s going to be to take this one apart. Poor guy.