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It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion.
- Thomas Jefferson

Darwinism, secularism, materialism -- these are notions that have seduced a lot of otherwise clever people into thinking we can simply spend what we received from our forefathers without ever looking to the bottom line.
- From:Try to Imagine Our Country's Founding if the Founders Had Not Been Advocates of Intelligent Design

How would our Declaration of Independence read?

We hold no truths to be self-evident, that all (men) are evolved based on chance, that they are endowed by a mindless chemical process from a mindless universal algorithm with circumstantial alienable rights that among these are a delusion of life, materialistic determinism, and the pursuit of happenstance.

DNA has the following:

1. Functional Information
2. Encoder
3. Error Correction
4. Decoder

How could such a system form randomly, without any intelligence, and totally unguided?

What would come first - the encoder, error correction, or the decoder? How and where did the functional information originate? IOW did the hardware create the software - or did the software create the self-replicating hardware? – All rhetorical questions…

Unguided Chemical Processes Cannot Explain the Origin of the Genetic Code.
To appreciate this problem, consider the origin of the first DVD and DVD player. DVDs are rich in information, but without the machinery of a DVD player to read the disk, process its information, and convert it into a picture and sound, the disk would be useless. But what if the instructions for building the first DVD player were only found encoded on a DVD? You could never play the DVD to learn how to build a DVD player. So how did the first disk and DVD player system arise? The answer is obvious: a goal-directed process -- intelligent design -- is required to produce both the player and the disk.

In living cells, information-carrying molecules (such as DNA or RNA) are like the DVD, and the cellular machinery that reads that information and converts it into proteins is like the DVD player. As in the DVD analogy, genetic information can never be converted into proteins without the proper machinery. Yet in cells, the machines required for processing the genetic information in RNA or DNA are encoded by those same genetic molecules -- they perform and direct the very task that builds them.

This system cannot exist unless both the genetic information and transcription/translation machinery are present at the same time, and unless both speak the same language. Not long after the workings of the genetic code were first uncovered, biologist Frank Salisbury explained the problem in a paper in American Biology Teacher:

It's nice to talk about replicating DNA molecules arising in a soupy sea, but in modern cells this replication requires the presence of suitable enzymes. ... [T]he link between DNA and the enzyme is a highly complex one, involving RNA and an enzyme for its synthesis on a DNA template; ribosomes; enzymes to activate the amino acids; and transfer-RNA molecules. ... How, in the absence of the final enzyme, could selection act upon DNA and all the mechanisms for replicating it? It's as though everything must happen at once: the entire system must come into being as one unit, or it is worthless. There may well be ways out of this dilemma, but I don't see them at the moment.

The same problem confronts modern RNA world researchers, and it remains unsolved. As two theorists observed in a 2004 article in Cell Biology International:

The nucleotide sequence is also meaningless without a conceptual translative scheme and physical "hardware" capabilities. Ribosomes, tRNAs, aminoacyl tRNA synthetases, and amino acids are all hardware components of the Shannon message "receiver." But the instructions for this machinery is itself coded in DNA and executed by protein "workers" produced by that machinery. Without the machinery and protein workers, the message cannot be received and understood. And without genetic instruction, the machinery cannot be assembled.

From: Top Five Problems with Current Origin-of-Life Theories

Examples of beneficial human mutations in evolutionary literature :

1. Sickle Cell Anemia
2. Cystic Fibrosis
3. Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase Deficiency
4. Tay-Sachs Disease
5. Autism
6. Rape
7. Murder
8. Stupidity

DNA has the following:
1. Functional Information
2. Encoder
3. Error Correction
4. Decoder

Functional only in the sense that DNA is translated to RNA that is translated to amino acid peptides that are folded, not always spontaneously, into proteins that, after various degrees of processing, are functional.

However, DNA does not have encoders, decoders, or error correction. These functions are provided by cellular machinery in the form of proteins. It is true that the information for the first order structure of the protein subunits is encoded in DNA, but the overall information, so to speak, that determines the higher order and resulting function of the assembled machines as well as their function in the overall economy of the cell has not, to this point, been found to be encoded in DNA.

You cite Jefferson in defense of the Judeo-Christian Tradition impelling our Founding Fathers to declare the principles of government upon which they based the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps we can find the most complete statement supporting what you say in a letter to John Adams, dated April 11, 1823, where Jefferson not only makes clear his faith in Christianity, but also in Creationism. Moreover, he argues ID (Intelligent Design). He makes clear, beyond any dispute, both his support of Christianity and of Creationism:
“The argument which they [the disciples of Ocellus, Timaeus, Spinosa, Diderot and D'Holbach] rest on as triumphant and unanswerable is, that in every hypothesis of cosmogony, you must admit an eternal pre-existence of something; and according to the rule of sound philosophy, you are never to employ two principles to solve a difficulty when one will suffice. They say then, that it is more simple to believe at once in the eternal pre-existence of the world, as it is now going on, and may forever go on by the principle of reproduction which we see and witness, than to believe in the eternal pre-existence of an ulterior cause, or Creator of the world, a Being whom we see not and know not, of whose form, substance and mode, or place of existence, or of action, no sense informs us, no power of the mind enables us to delineate or comprehend.”

By 141 years Jefferson anticipates the detection of the cosmic microwave background radiation signaling the beginning of the universe. Amazing!

He continues: “On the contrary, I hold, (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the universe, in its parts, general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. . The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces; the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere; animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles; insects, mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organized as man or mammoth; the mineral substances, their generation and uses; it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe, that there is in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a Fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their Preserver and Regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regeneration into new and other forms.”

. . . . . Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, in 19 volumes, Memorial Edition, edited by Albert Ellery Burgh, Vol 15, pg 425

Thanks for your comeback, and thanks for the scientific data and the support you offer. Most appreciated.