Blow Your Mind Watching DNA Repair Itself

Animation of DNA break repair is
almost sure to convince one of design.
But let’s see how Darwinians handle it.

 

A mind-boggling video has been making the rounds on social media. It carries the risk of converting one to a believer in intelligent design almost instantly. Beware, atheists!

The video, just under 4 minutes long, shows how a cell repairs its DNA if it breaks or is cut. Actually released in 2024, this video is gaining views on X. It was not made by religious people or intelligent design advocates, but by secular scientists at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Australia. Dr Drew Berry, producer of the video, is the head of the biomedical animations team. He collaborates with a team of scientists on the details of his animations, and makes them artistic as well as accurate. He said,

It is all derived from real science. It is accurate to scale, accurate to speed. Once we have the data in the animation system we can manipulate it to make it watchable.

WEHI’s YouTube channel has produced a number of detailed animations of processes occurring in cells. This particular video has garnered 386,000 views so far.

“DNA Break Repair by Homologous Recombination” animates what really happens in our nucleated cells every day. In a flurry of activity, an army of enzymes assembles to rejoin a broken strand of DNA. “Homologous recombination” includes a process of matching up the broken strand with an intact strand. Then, two Holliday junctions around the break move toward each other till the repaired strand is released, free to resume its normal activity. (Note: colors and sound effects are added for interest; the operation is silent and takes place in the darkness inside the nuclei of living cells.) Viewers do not need to understand all the details to realize that something fantastic, purposeful, and extremely well coordinated is taking place.

Watch the video here:

Evolve that, Darwin!

Needless to say, such an exquisite, rapid, and effective repair mechanism SCREAMS design! But will Darwinists throw in the towel and admit defeat? Will they confess that Charles Darwin’s antiquated Victorian concept of the cell as an “undifferentiated blob of protoplasm” cannot handle realities that have come to light in the 21st century?

A scientific paper this week about a similarly complex operation, DNA Proofreading, was just published in Science Magazine. Let’s watch their feeble attempt at maintaining their view that cells emerged by blind, unguided natural processes, and that life went from goo to you by way of the zoo without a master Designer.

Evolution of error correction through a need for speed (Ravasio et al., Science, 19 Feb 2026). Seven molecular biologists and biochemists primarily from the University of Chicago try their hand at evolving repair processes like this one. The team includes Nobel laureate Jack Szostak, a leader in origin-of-life research, who could not answer Dr James Tour’s challenge in 2023. Get your Baloney Detector fired up; let’s look at their reasoning about how such complex operations might emerge by chance. This should be fun.

The Editor’s Summary shows that the authors intend for their hypothesis to explain all complex operations in biological processes by evolution only:

Life expends substantial effort correcting errors introduced by the forces of disorder. Molecular machines, from polymerases to the ribosome, use elaborate proofreading schemes to double-check their work, reducing errors at the cost of time and energy. Such mechanisms may not evolve easily because they devote precious resources to fixing mistakes. However, mistakes themselves also impose a time penalty, an effect known as stalling. Ravasio et al. present a theoretical analysis showing that because of stalling, error-correction mechanisms can in fact evolve to accelerate biological processes. The researchers found experimental support for this conclusion across a wide range of systems, from genome replication to the assembly of complex molecular structures.

That’s the sales pitch: “Our notion is that such complex things can evolve! Watch this!”. OK, let us watch how they do this trick. Can a hat emerge and pull a rabbit out all by itself without a magician?

The Darwinian authors understand what they’re up against:

• “Error-correcting mechanisms are ubiquitous in biology and are found whenever a process must select a correct substrate over alternative, incorrect substrates.”
• The above is true for DNA synthesis, DNA replication, tRNA aminoacylation, and ribosomal assembly, and more.
• “In many cases, the fidelity achieved by biology exceeds that expected from equilibrium thermodynamics, that is, from differences in binding energy between correct and incorrect substrates.”
• “Large genomes need error correction to avoid the error catastrophe, yet canonical error-correcting machinery itself seems to require sizable, information-rich genomes.”
• Error correction creates a “chicken-and-egg problem for fidelity.” How could a cell do without it from the beginning?

“Error catastrophe” refers to the outcome of errors accumulating in an informational system. Without high fidelity duplication, information quickly collapses into gibberish. So how do they get around these design requirements? Answer: they separate speed from fidelity. They propose that selection for speed came first, and fidelity second. But watch for the magic words and question-begging assumptions:

In the context of the origins of life, the speed-first route to error correction suggests a way around the chicken-and-egg problem for fidelity. Large genomes need error correction to avoid the error catastrophe, yet canonical error-correcting machinery itself seems to require sizable, information-rich genomes. Our results suggest a resolution of this tension by showing that simple error-correcting mechanisms could evolve before the evolution of complex ribozymes such as an RNA replicase. The key mechanism is that misincorporations stall growth, so that variants with even rudimentary error correction replicate faster and become more abundant, even before other information-rich function-encoding sequences emerge.

Once such speed-selected error correction mechanisms are in place, the resulting incidental increase in fidelity can be co-opted to maintain and evolve increasingly information-rich sequences. For example, high-fidelity RNA replication would enable the evolution of new advantageous ribozymes, creating a secondary selective pressure to retain and refine the error-correcting mechanisms that initially evolved “for free“. This two-step dynamic—speed advantage first, functional payoff later—is an example of a complexity ratchet: Nonequilibrium machinery becomes entrenched not because complexity was needed, but because selection for speed favors it and subsequent functions lock it in place. Accordingly, the evolutionary path to error-correcting ribozymes and, by extension, to large, information-bearing genomes may be smoother than previously thought.

Let’s get this straight. Stalling is bad, because it brings life to a halt. Therefore life “needed” a way to avoid stalling. Presto! A hat emerged to meet this need! Then “selection pressure” produced a rabbit that the hat could pull out of itself. These wonders evolved for free! No intelligence required! What a smooth magic act. Szostak holds up a sign saying, APPLAUSE.

Clear-thinking heads must shame these charlatans out of science. Even in the most charitable version of this tale, it won’t wash. Imagine some mindless machine trying to copy DNA. It’s fast but has low fidelity. What’s going to happen? It will produce strands of gibberish long before some “subsequent functions” or a “functional payoff” arrives (or emerges, one of the Darwinists’ favorite miracle words). The hat will evaporate before the rabbit emerges, leaving behind the smoke of error catastrophe.

A need cannot pull a solution from nothing. Just because it would be nice to have a fast, high-fidelity molecular machine, nothing in nature requires that it materialize. The laws of probability guarantee that it never will.

False Forces and Fake Physics

Oh, but Jack insists, “selection pressure” will push it toward a functional payoff. Selection works like a “complexity ratchet,” storing up functions and preventing error catastrophe. Error-correcting ribozymes will emerge (even though Jack and his fellow believers have not been able to make any using intelligent design). By extension, he thinks, information-bearing genomes can smoothly materialize from mindless chaos. Selection pressure might even cause an arm to emerge for pulling the futureware rabbit out of the emergent hat! It’s plausible, isn’t it? Where is your faith?

Jack, ever hear of begging the question?

Show us your barometer for selection pressure, Jack and friends. What are the units? Where are your equations? If this is science, we want to know how many megadarwins of selection pressure it takes to push a mindless machine up the ratchet from chaos to an information-bearing genome. Without observational evidence backed by mathematical rigor, “selection pressure” begs the question of Darwinian natural selection, and natural selection is merely a restatement of the Stuff Happens Law, which is anti-science.

Logical Inference vs Magic

No, Jack team, we lack the faith to believe in nonsense. What we do know, and observe, and can measure, is that every device that can proofread and correct errors to prevent error catastrophe has been the product of a mind with intention and intelligence. When we encounter a wonder like DNA Break Repair by Homologous Recombination, we make the scientific “inference to the best explanation” that intelligent design is vastly superior to chance.

When the Great Darwini pulls a rabbit out of a hat, we infer it’s not magic or miracle. We know it is a well-thought-out illusion for entertainment of guests. The hat and the rabbit were already there. The magician’s shout “Abracadabra! Aminocamino!” was merely a distraction. Everything was planned—by design.

Watch that video again. For overkill, here’s another one from WEHI:

ID is the future of science. Beat the crowds. Get out of the Darwinian mindset before it collapses and becomes remembered as the Worst Idea in the History of Science.