At the website of Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis (AIG) — described in the Cast of Characters section of our Intro page — we found a goodie by Dr. Georgia Purdom, one of AIG’s best creation scientists. Her biographical writeup says: “She is the only female Ph.D. scientist engaged in full-time speaking and research for a biblical creationist organization in North America.” She “served as a professor of biology for six years at Mount Vernon Nazarene University in Ohio.” Additionally, we are told:

Dr. Purdom also has a passion to help women understand the importance of Genesis for their roles as wives and mothers and is an excellent choice to speak to women’s groups. As a wife and mother herself she has a vested interest in understanding what Genesis has to say to women.

Consistent with her interest in women’s issues, Purdom’s article is DNA in the Kitchen. Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us:

DNA is all around us. It is found in every plant and animal. You literally eat it at every meal. It is possible to extract pieces of DNA, consisting of billions of basic units (called “bases,” abbreviated as A, C, T, and G), with just a common onion and a few household chemicals.

Wow — an onion! We know you’re interested. She continues:

It is amazing what you can hold in your hand. Each DNA strand is an extremely long molecule. While humans have about 3 billion bases in their DNA, the garden onion (Allium cepa) has 15 billion bases. If the DNA in a single human cell were stretched out it would be 6 feet (1.8 m) long, so imagine how long the DNA from an onion cell would be!

That’s the only paragraph that interested us. The onion’s genome is five times larger than ours. What does that say about the work of the designer? What wonders lurk within the onion’s DNA that were left out of ours? Purdom doesn’t tell us. She doesn’t even pick up on the question. She doesn’t say much at all, really. Here’s how she ends the article:

The DNA molecule is often compared to a book. The DNA bases (A, C, T, and G) form words called genes. The genes contain all sorts of information necessary for life. As we continue to learn more about this wonder, we can appreciate the wisdom and goodness of the author, God. He is the author of life, who created DNA to provide the information necessary for the development and growth of living organisms, including you and me. Think about this the next time you eat an onion!

So what do we get out of this? Perhaps the onion is superior to us. Maybe they’re just biding their time, waiting to emerge from their apparent vegetative state to assert mastery over us. It must be so, or they would not have such an ominously large genome.

As we’ve written before, A Japanese Plant Has the World’s Biggest Genome. That plant’s genome is 50 times longer than the genome of a human being. Also, the amoeba has a genome far larger than ours.

Not only that, but there’s an even more recent discovery — the genome of the Christmas tree is being decoded. See Huge DNA code of the Christmas tree being revealed. PhysOrg reports that the Norway spruce has a genome six times bigger than ours, and other conifer genomes are even larger. And remember, creationists are always telling us that there’s no junk in DNA. The designer doesn’t do sloppy work.

So anyone who claims that DNA is perfectly designed must either acknowledge the divine superiority of the onion (and the amoeba and the Christmas tree), or he has a lot of explaining to do.

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