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Torn Business Cards and the 3-Billion Base Sequence: Re-examining the Hypothesis of DNA Strand Separation and Replication Through Logic and Probability

发布时间：

2026-07-27

Torn Business Cards and the 3-Billion Base Sequence: Re-examining the Hypothesis of DNA Strand Separation and Replication Through Logic and Probability

Sun Zuodong

In The Origin of Continents and Oceans, Wegener put forward a classic analogy that has influenced the scientific community for generations: the strata and mountain contours of South America and Africa can fit perfectly with each other, just like a torn business card whose two halves are put back together. This metaphor contains a fundamental rule: once an intact structure carrying continuous and ordered information breaks, the probability that all fragments can be precisely matched to restore all information is extremely low. This is already true for a business card with limited information. If we replace it with a complete newspaper carrying massive continuous narratives, the difficulty of fully restoring all information after tearing will rise exponentially.

The human genome contains approximately 3 billion base pairs. The DNA double helix structure can be vividly understood as a spirally extended long ladder, and base pairs are the horizontal crossbeams connecting the two long strands. According to the semi-conservative DNA replication model, during biological reproduction, the complete double strand fully unwinds and separates into two independent single strands; offspring obtain one single strand, use this single strand as a template to synthesize a brand-new complementary strand, and eventually form two sets of DNA molecules.

We can convert this into an easy-to-understand picture: a complete newspaper shaped by billions of years of evolution and carrying all characteristic information of a species’ life is torn vertically during genetic transmission. The parent retains half of the newspaper and only passes the other half to its offspring. Relying on this incomplete page, a complementary half with coherent and complete information needs to be regenerated.

We can find irreconcilable internal contradictions in this replication hypothesis through deduction from two dimensions: philosophical logic and mathematical probability.

From a logical perspective, there is a consensus in modern biology: base sequences are structurally fragile. Any deletion, dislocation or breakage of a base, that is, damage to any crossbeam of the spiral ladder, will induce genetic mutations, further leading to trait variation, hereditary diseases and other outcomes. Carriers of genetic information need to maintain stability continuously. Even when passed down in complete form from generation to generation, accidental damage is hard to avoid during replication. A logical inference follows: the underlying mechanism of life inheritance must prioritize protecting the integrity of genetic information. If complete strands are prone to damage even when transmitted as a whole, it is hardly possible that nature would set the active splitting of the complete set of genetic sequences as the conventional way of reproduction.

From a probabilistic perspective, the complete genome has 3 billion base loci, and every locus must match precisely one by one to replicate a sequence with consistent information. Wegener’s analogy of the torn business card reveals that matching the edge contours of homologous fragments is already rare, yet the realization conditions of semi-conservative replication are far stricter. It is not a matter of splicing two original fragments together; instead, it requires constructing a complete and coherent set of complementary information from scratch relying on a single incomplete strand of information.

The left and right pages of a newspaper with coherent and connected narrative information are interrelated. Even if the torn edges roughly align, one half cannot be used to deduce all the original information carried by the other half. The two strands together form an indivisible set of continuous information. After forced separation, the probability of restoring the complete global sequence relying only on local fragments approaches zero infinitely.

We do not deny the objective fact that complementary base pairing can be observed in short nucleic acid sequences and microbial plasmids. Okazaki fragments discovered in cellular observations are often cited as evidence of strand synthesis, yet the scope must be clarified: such phenomena mostly correspond to micro-processes inside cells such as DNA damage repair, rather than the full-genome replication mechanism during generational inheritance of species. Laws established in small-scale systems cannot be directly extended to the complete genomes of higher organisms with billions of base pairs without rigorous argumentation.

Based on the above deductions, this paper puts forward a conjecture: the stable generational inheritance of species depends on integral replication of full strands. The complete double strand acts as a unified and indivisible whole to finish full duplication. The basic carrier of genetic information adopts a folded windmill tetramer structure, which consists of four leaf-shaped units, and each leaf carries a complete and continuous set of genetic information, analogous to a complete newspaper page. Numerous windmill tetramers are connected in order to form the complete genetic long chain. Information is stored relying on independent and intact leaf units, just like an unseparated complete newspaper page, fundamentally eliminating the possibility of reconstructing the full set of genetic information from fragmented incomplete data.

Changes in genetic sequences fall into two types: The first is passive damage: accidental breakage and partial variation of complete strands during transmission, corresponding to genetic mutations widespread in nature, and most congenital diseases are related to this kind of passive destruction. The second is active fine-tuning: organisms realize partial sequence optimization while completely retaining core genetic information, namely biological evolution, which gradually promotes the improvement of species traits. Both types of changes are entirely based on the stable transmission of intact genetic carriers.

What makes humans human, dogs dogs and fish fish is that species boundaries are locked by the complete set of genetic information. Only fully copying the whole newspaper and completely replicating the full double strand can avoid massive error correction costs brought by full strand separation, and guarantee the stable inheritance of species characteristics from generation to generation.

Combining the principle of information continuity and mathematical probability deduction, we can draw a clear inference: during generational inheritance of higher organisms, the replication path that unwinds the complete DNA double strand and relies on separated single strands as templates to reconstruct the full genome is untenable.

We recognize the objective existence of the spatial structure of the DNA double helix, and do not deny complementary base pairing of short nucleic acid fragments. However, extending local experimental conclusions from short sequences to the complete genomes of higher organisms with 3 billion base pairs lacks self-consistency in underlying logic. After splitting a complete long strand, the probability of synthesizing a complementary strand with coherent information and perfectly matched loci one by one relying only on an isolated single strand approaches zero infinitely. It can thus be judged that the replication mode relying on single strands to reconstruct the genome cannot serve as the general mechanism for stable inheritance of higher organisms. The semi-conservative replication model, long regarded as the golden standard in textbooks, is insufficient to explain the underlying laws of stable continuation of higher species, so it is necessary to re-examine this classic paradigm.

The development of science is built on rational speculation, and all hypotheses ultimately need to be tested by conclusive experiments. This paper only presents viewpoints for academic discussion, and scholars from all walks of academia are welcome to carry out rational exchanges, discussions and verification.