Just the Biased Facts

Here in New Zealand the debate between religion and evolution is a muted affair, while news on the topic regularly makes headlines in the US, here it goes almost beneath notice. That is not to say the clash does not exist here, merely that it tends not to intrude into the public sphere. Over time the form of the argument has changed but at its heart the source of the conflict has remained the same, discoveries in science have unseated the traditional view of a divinely created world in which Humans are the pinnacle of creation.

At this point I would like to make it clear that the findings of science are not incompatible with such a view.  Even so, to accommodate the conclusions of scientific enquiries into nature certain tenets that were previously held to be literal truths (such as 7 day creation) must be reinterpreted symbolically. As in any human endeavour there exists a spectrum of approaches to the religious significance of science’s discoveries. To some, science represents the deepest truth we can know about the world, provisional as it may be, and as such must also inform the religious outlook. For others revealed scripture is the ultimate authority and where this disagrees with science, well, so much the worse for science. Most people fall somewhere between these two extremes.

I seldom wade directly into this debate but recently came across a paper that outlines some of the peculiarities to be found in our genome (in particular but multicellular life in general) which was framed in the context of refuting design. The paper is “Footprints of Nonsentient Design Inside the Human Genome” written by John C. Avise and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Before getting to the crux of his argument Avise spends some time to give a brief history of three concepts that have a bearing on the discussion of design in nature. Touching on Socrates, Reverend William Paley’s famous work “Natural Theology” and Darwin’s own thoughts on the topic Avise gives a primer on how the natural world was considered in pre-Darwin times. From here we move onto the rise of modern Creationism and Intelligent Design, charting it’s progression from the early 1980s to the more recent strategy of proposing the concept of “Irreducible Complexity“.

Finally there is a similarly brief sketch of Theodicy, or the attempt to reconcile the existence suffering in the world with the traditional view of an all-powerful and all-loving deity (if you are playing charades I recommend doing “sounds like” and then try acting out Odysseus’ journey following the fall of Troy). This last seems somewhat out of place in a paper such as this but the relevance becomes clear once the author begins to expound on the multitude of human ailments that are the result of imperfections in the architecture and the replicating processes of our genome.

The numbers involved and breadth of disease in this section are truly staggering, to quote from the paper itself:

Various mutations are known to debilitate the nervous system, liver, pancreas, bones, eyes, ears, skin, urinary and reproductive tracts, endocrine system, blood and other features of the circulatory system, muscles, joints, dentition, immune system, digestive tract, limbs, lungs, and almost any other body part you can name.

In covering the various methods we use to keep track of genetic diseases, one of which being the reference text “Mendelian Inheritance in Man” Avise notes that “the current version of which describes thousands of human genes, of which more than 75% are documented to carry mutational defects associated with a disease condition.” and concerning another effort at documentation the “Human Genome Mutation Database” states “recent versions of which describe more than 75,000 different disease-causing mutations identified to date“.

After all of this preamble we finally get to the design flaws we have been promised, the first being “Split Genes”. Here is where things get technical. A quick “Genetics 101″, while we may think of genes as being discrete entities in our cells that code for the proteins making up our bodies, one gene to one protein, things are actually a lot more complicated. What actually occurs for many genes is a long stretch of DNA, some of which is needed for the gene and some of which isn’t. These parts are called Exons (needed bits) and Introns (extra bits), imagine reading Harry Potter and finding someone had randomly glued in pages from the dictionary. This means each time our cells want to make a new copy of a protein the extra bits need to be chopped out and the needed bits stitched back together first.

This process is both wasteful (unnecessary copying and fixing of the gene coding regions) and harmful, to quote once again:

“An astonishing discovery is that a large fraction (perhaps one-third) of all known human genetic disorders is attributable in at least some clinical cases to mutational blunders in how premRNA molecules are processed”

Next up is is a section discussing gene regulation and surveillance of errors. I have to say, this part is too complicated for me to parse ant this late hour. So I’ll leave that one for the adventuresome. Suffice it to say that the regulation (turning genes on and off) and copying of our genes is a complicated and error prone business, too much so if we are to consider it the perfect solution to the problem of creating human life.

The next stop on our curious ride is the mitochondria, or more specifically mitochondrial DNA. You may recall the oft repeated refrain that the mitochondria is the “powerhouse of the cell”, not to be confused with midichlorians which mediate the power of the Force. The mitochondria contain the reactions that allow us to extract energy from our food, without them you would die in very short order. It is one of the more intriguing facts about our cells that the mitochondria are equipped with their own DNA, and yet this DNA does not contain all of the information required to carry out the life giving energy reactions, it is supplemented by the DNA contained in the nucleus of the cell, your genomic DNA. Not only this but the interior of the mitochondria is a poor place to keep DNA, it is after all where energetic reactions are being carried out and toxic waste products are produced. Would you keep a valuable library in a working furnace?

These facts are all but inexplicable (and a great many more are mentioned in the paper) by appeal to a perfect designer but they are relatively easily dealt with via the paradigm that mitochondria are the remnants of a symbiotic bacteria. One which long ago insinuated itself into our cells and over the millennia has shed much of it’s own genome while housed in it’s comfortable new habitat. An analogy might be the loss of certain mathematical abilities in modern students who rely on electronic devices to to the hard work of calculation for them.

The paper goes on to deal with repeating sections of DNA, the existence of duplicated genes and pseudogenes and roving DNA that copies itself around the genome. But you can read about those for yourself, this post is already more than typically verbose. I would just like to sum up with the final hopeful run-on sentence (cousins of which plague my own writing) of the author:

“The evolutionary-genetic sciences thus can help religions to escape from the profound conundrums of ID, and thereby return religion to its rightful realm—not as the secular interpreter of the biological minutiae of our physical existence but, rather, as a respectable philosophical counselor on grander matters, including ethics and morality, the soul, spiritualness, sacredness, and other such matters that have always been of ultimate concern to humanity.”

Not exactly an uncontroversial sentiment itself.

Avise, J. (2010). Colloquium Paper: Footprints of nonsentient design inside the human genome Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (Supplement_2), 8969-8976 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914609107

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