Code of Life

DNA is often dubbed the Code of Life. A web search for that term turns up hits for universities, scientific journals & periodicals, and media outlets of the highest calibers of prestige, and even a highly ranked link to the creationist site Answers in Genesis selling a book called Code of Life. My own favorite Theory of Evolution skeptic, Do-While Jones at scienceagainstevolution.info, writes highly compelling (and entertaining) critiques of the theory of evolution by random chance, sometimes going line by line through published articles to demonstrate the impossibility of their conclusions. And yet, he still makes the same basic assumption that DNA is the Code of Life. His only objection is that it could not have arisen by random processes as the mainstream scientists believe. Do-While - a lifelong engineer - is certain that DNA had to have been designed. Thus, he believes in a designer. Does that make him a creationist, rather than a materialist? I say he is both. He believes in a creator, and yet he also believes that the form and function of all life is fully described by the material properties of DNA. His outlook is fully equivalent to that of Big Bang Theory advocates, as described in a recent edition of Contrabang!

All of this stems from the modern scientists' need to push back the mysteries of existence to a sort of universal wind-up clock that proceeds mechanistically from its initial conditions. Ask them how or why the wind-up clock was set into motion, and they are left grasping at straws, but still are very confident that it all follows logically from that point. As Rupert Sheldrake quips about modern scientists, give them one free miracle, and they'll explain the rest.

Creationists like Do-While do for species what BBT advocates do for the universe: push everything mysterious back to one free miracle. I realize now that Creationism isn't necessarily a religious standpoint, although evolutionists will assume it is in their haste to dismiss dissent. Do-While's personal beliefs do not bleed into his arguments. It is not clear whether he is a Christian, atheist, or something else. When you think about it, it's not even a Christian-compliant theory. No where does the Bible indicate that God created an elaborate mechanistic universe and then stepped aside while it ran its course. He intervenes routinely throughout the Bible. Nor does atheism allow for a Creator. Do-While's basis for a DNA designer stem solely from evidence, as the evolution of DNA by random chance is a theory without any supporting evidence.

Still, he misses all the evidence that should dismiss the assumption of material as the sole ingredient of life. Now, one might argue that perhaps he doesn't personally believe it either, but is merely adopting the standard assumptions to make the strongest scientific argument possible. Well, it doesn't work that way. There's nothing special about a scientific argument; it's either true or it isn't. Adopting a false framework to repudiate a false framework amounts to telling a lie to reveal a truth. It serves no net benefit. Still, I have no reason to believe that he is doing anything other than speaking the truth as he understands it to be.

The primary argument against biological materialism is that there are only 19,000 genes in the human genome. That this doesn't cause every rational being to immediately drop the whole notion of genetic Code of Life must be - besides religious conviction - a tendency to overestimate the significance of 19,000 genes and to underestimate the complexity of humans. Consider just the three pounds of the human body inside our skulls. They make up the single most complex structure in the known universe. Think of how complex a galaxy is, with its 100 billion stars neatly arranged into rotating spiral arms. The human brain contains 100 billion neurons, which sounds similar in scale, until you realize that those neurons make up to 1,000 trillion (one quadrillion) interconnections- that is 1,000,000,000,000,000. 19,000 starts to like pretty puny. $19,000 sounds like a lot money. It sure would be nice to come upon an extra 19 grand! Now imagine that with that $19K you are expected to buy everything. Everything on planet Earth. All the buildings, cars, roads, nuclear submarines, mineral rights...everything. In comparison to all that, $19,000 will only buy a single new entry-level compact car. Saying that you can describe the form and function of the human body in 19,000 genes is like trying to buy the whole globe with 19,000 dollars.

Some will try to make appeals to combinatorial complexity to explain the shortcoming. "The state space of 19,000 genes is actually enormous!" Well, it is, but that is only relevant if you disregard everything that is known about cellular biology. Combinatorial complexity refers to the amount of data that can be represented by some data structure. For instance, a single bit has a state space of size two: 0 or 1. Two bits has a state space size of four:  11, 10, 01, 00. Three bits has state space of size 9, four bits size 16, five bits size 32, and six bits size 64. It would be tempting to say then, that six bits would allow us to encode, say, all 45 of the US presidents. That would be true within certain contexts. If I wrote software for a school, and I was tasked with recording each student's favorite president, it could be optimized by allocating just the six necessary bits per student to identify the president. However, those, bits don't actually tell any of the relevant information, such as the president's name, years served, notable achievements, etc. That requires some functionality to map the bit values to data stored elsewhere.

The genome really does explode with combinatorial complexity. There are 19,000 genes, each an average of 27,000 base pairs long, and 4 different base pairs, so there are 4^27,000^19,000 combinations. That reads as "four to the twenty-seven thousandth power to the nineteen thousandth power." That number is approximately infinity, so does that mean we have the near infinite data required to describe the form and function of the human body? No, because there is not a function to map the genes into other usable data. The genes are the raw data. Consider what happens if we alter a single set of base pairs on a gene. According to them, it would mean an elephant could become a squid. That's the implication if every genetic combination represents independent organisms. In reality, those changes will have - if any - a negative effect on the protein encoded by that gene, and potentially a disastrous one. The worst cases will result in defects so severe that the embryo doesn't survive a single cellular division and the brief pregnancy miscarries. Thus, the vast majority of the state space is invalid since non-functional proteins are encoded.

That is one technical argument, but there are other intuitive ways to understand this. There are many videos on YouTube of cell microbiology in action, thanks to microscopes that can see down to the molecular level. Many are mesmerizing, as the cell shows itself as a highly complex, organized, and efficient machine. The process of converting DNA to proteins is quite complex, requiring transcription, transportation, and translation. How do the various bits of the cell "know" what to do in these co-ordinated processes? It is assumed by most people that the activity is somehow controlled by the nucleus, which is often dubbed a "control center," even in educational literature. In truth, the cell can survive without a nucleus at all. Mammalian red blood cells have no nucleus, yet carry out their duties for up to four months. Some unicellular organisms are capable of re-generation; even fragments without a nucleus can re-generate the entire form of the organism - with no DNA at all! If that doesn't disprove the theory that all inherited traits are genetic, then I don't know what would.

Epigenetics is another challenge to the consensus position. Scientists have discovered they can condition rats with certain behaviors, such as fear of a certain scent, and that trait is still detectable in the next two generations of offspring, even when environment is strictly controlled. We know that the inherited traits cannot be genetic. Scientists assume changes happen in the body of the cell that alter gene interpretation. How that accounts for the coding of a complex behavior to a specific molecule accounts as yet more promissory science. No one knows how the cell could physically record and pass on such information, but it is assumed it must do it somehow.

Generally speaking, behavioral inheritance is probably the biggest thorn in the side for proponents for Biological Materialism. As pointed out in that article, one famous biologist has already called out the shortage of genes to explain the vast number of inheritable behavioral traits. Then another scientist responded, amusingly, that there don't appear to be enough enough genes for physiological traits either, therefore there must somehow be enough genes for behavioral traits.

The behavioral genes gap is even greater for the animals where most behavior is innate. For instance, robins innately know to start building circular nests in April. If geneticists are correct, they should be able to specify which genes would have to be modified to change that behavior. What about square nests in October? If genes account for all biological inheritance, then there must be nest building instructions in there somewhere.

Give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest is a good summary for promissory science in general, but it falls short in the specific case of evolution by genetics, where the motto should be give us unlimited free miracles and we'll explain some of it. By comparison, religious fundamentalists only require the one free miracle. But that gets to our major point. The materialists are religious fundamentalists, their belief system just requires many more miracles. It takes an awful lot of faith to be a materialist.