You Won’t Believe This One: Gene Splicing Stuns and Bewilders Evolutionists
Proteins perform a wide variety of tasks in the cell and when a particular job needs to be done the right protein is quickly synthesized by unwinding the right DNA gene, making a copy, editing the transcript, and translating the transcript, according to the DNA code, into a sequence of amino acids. Evolutionists had no explanation for this incredible and profound molecular manufacturing system (which still out performs anything scientists can come up with), but they remained steadfast. Indeed they argued all of this provided yet more proofs for evolution. Why? Because the DNA code was essentially universal. As one evolutionist explained, while the genetic code is preserved across species, it would not be if the species had been created independently. [1] If that’s true then the genetic code must have somehow evolved. Is that true? It’s difficult to say because that is, as usual, a non scientific claim. But aside from the metaphysics and the unexplained molecular manufacturing system, there is another problem with this story. It has now turned out to demolish evolutionary theory and has left evolutionists staring into the headlights.
Years after the universal DNA code was discovered, several other codes were also discovered which were not only astonishingly complex, but they were not universal. One such code is the so-called splicing code.
In higher organisms many of the genes are broken up into expressed regions, or exons, which are separated by intervening regions, or introns. After the gene is copied the transcript is edited, splicing out the introns and glueing together the exons. Not only is it a fantastically complex process, it also adds tremendous versatility to how genes are used. A given gene may be spliced into alternate sets of exons, resulting in different protein machines. There are three genes, for example, that generate over 3,000 different spliced products to help control the neuron designs of the brain.
And how does the splicing machinery know where to cut and paste? There is an elaborate code that the splicing machinery uses to decide how to do its splicing. This splicing code is extremely complicated, using not only sequence patterns in the DNA transcript, but also the shape of transcript, as well as other factors.
[ It's been known for a long time gene expression is controlled by another code (in addition to the known protein-assembly code). Glad to see this is being recognized. ]
What is also complex about the new code is that it is context-dependent. In fact it even varies in different tissue types within a species. And studies of RNA binding proteins show even more complexity. These proteins are part of the molecular splicing machinery and they often regulate each other leading to an “unprecedented degree of complexity and compensatory relationships.” As one researcher explained:
We identified thousands of binding sites and altered splicing events for these hnRNP proteins and discovered that, surprisingly these proteins bind and regulate each other and a whole network of other RNA binding proteins.
Regulate each other and a whole network of other RNA binding proteins? Needless to say there is no scientific explanation for how this marvel could have evolved. And since this code is not universal but, quite the opposite, highly varying even between tissues, we can safely conclude the “universal code” prediction of evolution is falsified.
If evolution is true then we expect codes to be universal. [ I think that was always a false premise. If genetic codes could spontaneously generate, that would have happened a vast number of times and some of the surviving life forms would have very different protein-assembly codes. ] Here we have an obvious example of a code that most definitely is not universal, so the prediction is false. And if a prediction is false, then either the theory is false, or it must be modified. But with so many falsifications, and so many modifications that make no sense on evolution, it is obvious that something is very wrong with the theory. In this case we would have to say that random mutations just happened to create many different splicing codes, over and over, of unimaginable complexity.
1. Mark Ridley, Evolution. (Boston: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1993) 49.
darwins-god.blogspot.com
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Lino D'Ischia June 23, 2012 12:33 PM
Oleg:
Nice story, but this is "apples" to evolution's "oranges."
As you state:
Einstein's relativity peacefully coexists with Newtonian mechanics. Wave theory of light agrees with geometrical optics in the appropriate limit, where both apply.
In the "limit" they are equivalent. And both Newtonian gravity, and Einstein-ian gravity, bring about correct results. You use one, or the other, given your needs. (Didn't Feynman calculate that the difference between the gravitational potential on the surface of the Sun using GR was different from Newtonian calculations by a factor of something like 1 in 10^12?)
The situation with NS is very different. It's predictions are almost nil; and most of Darwin's predictions have turned out to be wrong. Darwinism HAD to be joined to Mendelian genetics, and it was done only in a vague sort of way [R.A. Fisher, the Godfather of neo-Darwinism, used a formula (the genetical theory of evolution) which is used in statistical mechanics---so vague is it.]. And the Neutral Theory originated because of the complete failure of neo-Darwinism to explain the extremely high levels of polymorphism found in living beings (another "prediction"---this time of "neo"-Darwinism---that was wrong).
And, per the originator of Neutral Theory, Kimura, there are severe limitations to what Neutral Theory can do.
So, where does that leave us? Well, at the The Edge of Evolution! That is, NS does indeed have some applicability (Here's a prediction: in fifteen years, even the little that NS is supposed to be able to do will be shown to rely on other in vivo processes); but, it is indeed only at the 'edges', and very limited indeed.
When this limited mechanism encounters the type of problem-to-be-solved that CH is describing, no amount of NS/Neutral Theory, or whatever nonsense you want to throw at the problem, is going to even come remotely close to explaining its origins.
As CH points out, it's time to leave Darwinism on the dustbin of history, and to move on to something that makes sense: intelligent design.
BTW, Dr. Cornelius, here's a rejoinder to the argument made about the "universal" code: there are all kinds of computers, with all kind of different capabilities, running all sorts of different and very complex software programs, and they all are built on the x86 architecture. Does this prove that they evolved from one another? IOW, what limits a Designer from using the same design over and over, while building more powerful machines and software programs.
bornagain77 June 23, 2012 3:39 PM
Oleq , you mention many branches of science that have been modified as new evidence has come along. The trouble with your analogy is that at least those nascent theories had a mathematical foundation that comported somewhat roughly to reality to start off with. Darwinism never has had any such mathematical foundation;
Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Wolfgang Pauli on the Empirical Problems with Neo-Darwinism - Casey Luskin - February 27, 2012
Excerpt: "In discussions with biologists I met large difficulties when they apply the concept of 'natural selection' in a rather wide field, without being able to estimate the probability of the occurrence in a empirically given time of just those events, which have been important for the biological evolution. Treating the empirical time scale of the evolution theoretically as infinity they have then an easy game, apparently to avoid the concept of purposesiveness. While they pretend to stay in this way completely 'scientific' and 'rational,' they become actually very irrational, particularly because they use the word 'chance', not any longer combined with estimations of a mathematically defined probability, in its application to very rare single events more or less synonymous with the old word 'miracle.'" Wolfgang Pauli (pp. 27-28) -
evolutionnews.org
Murray Eden, as reported in “Heresy in the Halls of Biology: Mathematicians Question Darwinism,” Scientific Research, November 1967, p. 64.
“It is our contention that if ‘random’ is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.” Murray Eden, “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory,” Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, editors Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, June 1967, p. 109.
creationscience.com
Michael Behe on the theory of constructive neutral evolution - February 2012
Excerpt: I don’t mean to be unkind, but I think that the idea seems reasonable only to the extent that it is vague and undeveloped; when examined critically it quickly loses plausibility. The first thing to note about the paper is that it contains absolutely no calculations to support the feasibility of the model. This is inexcusable. - Michael Behe
uncommondescent.com
Oxford University Admits Darwinism's Shaky Math Foundation - May 2011
Excerpt: However, mathematical population geneticists mainly deny that natural selection leads to optimization of any useful kind. This fifty-year old schism is intellectually damaging in itself, and has prevented improvements in our concept of what fitness is. - On a 2011 Job Description for a Mathematician, at Oxford, to 'fix' the persistent mathematical problems with neo-Darwinism within two years.
evolutionnews.org
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John June 23, 2012 12:35 PM
I remember when they reverse engineered a good part of the splicing code (last year sometime wasn't it?) It would be really cool to see how the entire spliceosome moves and makes "decisions". The interesting thing is that this is a higher level code - ie. it's like C++ built upon the ASM code of DNA transcripts while the language suite itself is also built from ASM. What this means for evolution is that it somehow has to mutate the ASM level code which then has to be stable long enough to give the C++ code on top of it enough chance to evolve anything at all.
At what point can it be considered intelligently programmed? Or as they said, "When Messiah comes, will he do more miracles than these?"
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M. Holcumbrink June 23, 2012 9:28 PM
John, I think of that passage quite often, whenever the detractors of ID play the black knight. These people would ascribe intelligence to a single rune scrawled on a cave wall, but when we discover algorithmically compressed machine code regulating sophisticated compound machinery at the root of biological life, they chalk that up to a cosmic fart. So my thought becomes “you say life is not designed, but if it had been designed, would it be even more algorithmic, fully integrated, optimized and fantastic than this?”
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Claudiu Bandea June 24, 2012 5:57 AM
Elizabeth Liddle: And evolutionary theory, as you well know, Cornelius, is a scientific theory. So I ask you again: what is wrong with the theory of evolution as a explanation of "how this marvel could have evolved"?
True scientists should not just say that ‘evolution did it’, but they should present plausible models on 'how evolution did it'.
To my knowledge, no such models have been advanced by the current science establishment. Even worse, apparently, this issue has not been even been seriously raised, so we should thank Cornelius for raising it!
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