Genetic Information

Carl Sagan showed, using straightforward calculations, why one cell’s worth of genetic information approximates 4,000 books of printed information. Each of Sagan’s 4,000 books had 500 pages with 300 words per page. [See Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 25.]

Each book would have a volume of about 50 cubic inches. An adult human’s body contains about 1014 cells. About 800 cubic miles have been eroded from the Grand Canyon. Therefore, we can say that if every cell in one person’s body were reduced to 4,000 books, they would fill the Grand Canyon 98 times.





The Moon is 240,000 miles from Earth. If the DNA in a human cell were stretched out and connected, it would be more than 7 feet long. If all the DNA in one person’s body were placed end-to-end, it would extend to the Moon 552,000 times.





The DNA in a human cell weighs 6.4 × 10-12 grams. [See Monroe W. Strickberger, Genetics, 2nd edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1976), p. 54.] Probably less than 50 billion people have lived on earth. If so, one copy of the DNA of every human who ever lived—enough to define the physical characteristics of all those people in microscopic detail—would weigh only


6.4 × 10-12 × 50 × 109 = 0.32 grams


This is less than the weight of one aspirin.

“... there is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over. ... There is enough storage capacity in the DNA of a single lily seed or a single salamander sperm to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica 60 times over. Some species of the unjustly called ‘primitive’ amoebas have as much information in their DNA as 1,000 Encyclopaedia Britannicas.”

Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, pp. 116–117.

“Biochemical systems are exceedingly complex, so much so that the chance of their being formed through random shufflings of simple organic molecules is exceedingly minute, to a point indeed where it is insensibly different from zero.”

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, 8th Edition (2008), p. 3.

“No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole observable universe is not large enough to contain the necessary monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly the waste paper baskets required for the deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living material.”

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, p. 148.

Reference: creationscience.com