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Largest Genome Ever
sciencehabit writes "A rare Japanese flower named Paris japonica sports an astonishing 149 billion base pairs, making it 50 times the size of a human genome — and the largest genome ever found. The genome would be taller than Big Ben if stretched out end to end. The researchers warn however that big genomes tend to be a liability: plants with lots of DNA have more trouble tolerating pollution and extreme climatic extinctions—and they grow more slowly than plants with less DNA, because it takes so long to replicate their genome."
Big Ben is, technically, the nick-name of the Great Bell inside the clock tower. That bell is only slightly taller than 2 meters.
Everyone on the internet who has read or come near your post is now dumber because of it. I award you no points, and may Al Gore have mercy on your soul
Converted to mathematics, the error in logic if more clear:
1) You say that for all 'x', there must be an 'x-1'. ("a cause", "antecedent", "precedent", or whatever)
2) You say that "we atheists" claim that the "first thing" is '1'.
3) Hence, if there's a '1', there must be a '0'. ("the first thing must be created")
4) Then, you basically make the unfounded claim that '0' must be 'God'.*
The problem is that this simply implies that all negative numbers must exist also, (-1, -2, -3, etc...), since there's no reason to stop at 0.
In other words, there's no reason to stop at "God". God must also have a cause. And the cause of God must also have a cause, etc...
If you say that "God" is special and has no cause, then (1) was not true, it's actually "for all 'x' except some 'x' there must be an 'x-1'", which is a different rule. Hence, the whole argument is hogwash, since the original rule cannot be true for it to work. That is, if there are exceptions to the rule, then there's no reason for the Universe itself to not be one of those exceptions. This argument, and it's counter-arguments have been known since ancient times, it's not exactly new. You're not exactly surprising any Atheists with a shocking new proof. For crying out loud, there's a 10-page Wikipedia article about it's long history.
* I assume that you refer specifically to the Abrahamic God that spoke to a barely literate goat herder on the side of a mountain in ancient Palestine, raped some woman who was apparently a virgin despite living with her husband, and then watched his illegitimate son get executed, right? Otherwise you could be speaking of any God. Lets say, Zeus. I like Zeus. He's the kind of womanising, lightning-bolt throwing God I can relate to! Some of his human consorts were even awake when he impregnated them -- what a gentleman! If we're going to start making assumptions that "the cause of the universe" must be a specific God, lets pick a good one!
I have a fair bit of experience with these genome thingees and it being saturday night I have been drinking some complex carbohydrates mixed with alcohol so the activation energy for posting to slashdot has been reduced (normally most people alive would have something better to do- i know I do). Now, plant genomes expand for two reasons 1) polyploidy events - where the genome is oops accidently doubled (soybean), or 2) massive transposon expansion where small bits are copied many times to give a big genome (eg maize). It sounds like P. japonica is of the #2 variety, ie a small genome of a flowering plant that as been expanded over time by transposons and lost its ability to prune them back out again. So to answer the parents question: It is unlikely to prove radiation resistant as most transposon expanded genomes still only maintain a single copy (x2 for a diploid) of each gene, so a vital function is easily disrupted by radiation induced mutations. If however, P. japonica was massively polyploid, then perhaps it would offer so additional radiation protection- but as the polyploid state, is for most sexually reproducing plants, a temporary state, it could very likely collapse back down into a non-radition protected species quite quickly over time.
Large plant genomes tend to be polyploid (>2 copies of chromosomes) and full of repetitive elements. In other words, the overall complexity is similar to other plants, even though the total size is much larger.