It turns out that the specific arrangements of bases in DNA, like the arrangement of letters in an English sentence or digital characters in computer software, do not just exhibit a high degree of mathematical improbability. Instead, the specific arrangements of the nucleotide bases (especially in the coding regions of DNA) enable the DNA bases to perform a function in the cell. The bases in DNA convey instructions for building proteins—and do so in virtue of their specificity of arrangement. As Francis Crick explained in 1958, “Information means here the precise determination of sequence,
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