From Science Daily: New genes as essential as old ones

Evolutionary biologists have long proposed that the genes most important to life are ancient and conserved, handed down from species to species as the "bread and butter" of biology. New genes that arise as species split off from their ancestors were thought to serve less critical roles -- the "vinegar" that adds flavor to the core genes.


But when nearly 200 new genes in the fruit fly species Drosophila melanogaster were individually silenced in laboratory experiments at the University of Chicago, more than 30 percent of the knockdowns were found to kill the fly. The study, published December 17 in Science, suggests that new genes are equally important for the successful development and survival of an organism as older genes. (Dec. 16, 2010)

For more, go here.

This snippet underlines a key problem with Darwinism: When Darwinists make predictions that don’t pan out, their theory is by no means considered a less certain central dogma; rather, it elasticizes and expands to retrodict what happened. Each instance creates information loss for the theory.

Thus, the Darwinist can tell the public, in apparent good faith, that “overwhelming evidence” supports the theory. By “evidence” is meant only the decades-long series of special pleadings and patches, and occasional purgings of dissent.

Fruit fly: The fruit fly image was taken by Muhammad Mahdi Karim in Dar es Salaam and is offered here under the Gnu Free Documentation License.

Fish swap genes? Or Darwinists swap stories?

A research scientist friend writes to tell me about yet another example of Darwinism as a science stopper:

These scientists found that the antifreeze proteins of diverse species of fish are nearly identical. But they don't share a recent common ancestor. So even though they say that the chance of such similar proteins emerging in unrelated species is "vanishingly small" they would not think of seeing this as evidence for design; no, they propose another option. They think the genes for antifreeze proteins jumped from one species to another.

[ ... ]

And why is the Economist promoting Evolution?

Well actually, friend, The Economist is promoting magic.

Increasingly, as far as I can see, evolution is treated as magic. It is the all-purpose explanation whenever we come across anything in the world whose origin we don't understand: Evolution" (an immense, undefined power) dunit.

While plants and bacteria do swap genes, the idea that fish would swap them is certainly novel. From the article:

Fish species swap genes in a way that looks a bit like genetic engineering

SOME fish have special proteins in their blood to stop them from freezing to death—a remarkable evolutionary trait made no less so by the fact that biologists have known about it for some time. How this trait spread, though, turns out to be even more remarkable. If Peter Davies of Queen’s University in Ontario and his colleagues are right, it demonstrates in fish an evolutionary mechanism hitherto seen mainly in bacteria, viruses and genetic-engineering laboratories.

But okay, let's go there for a moment.

The male fish typically fertilizes the eggs after the female lays them. So gene swapping via escaped sperm is theoretically possible. (Whether it ever really happens is another story. )

If genes can truly jump between fish, as they can between plants, that would make ancestry irrelevant - hardly good news for the Darwinism the researchers are trying to save!

Think how much effort goes into tracing the ancestry of various fish species from earlier species. But gene swapping/protein swapping - assuming it actually happens in fish - would make such efforts irrelevant or time wasting. The occurrence of common traits between species of fish would not be proof of their common ancestry.

One reason that Darwinism is approaching a crisis is that Darwinists can only fend off design by adopting ideas that are almost as damaging to their basic thesis.

I wonder when they will try to tell me that park pigeons and dumpster raccoons swap genes without mating ... which is why [insert just-so story here .... ]

Another scientist friend has just (11:15 a.m. EST) written me to draw my attention to this article:

EVOLUTION: Taking the Long View

Laura M. Zahn

It can be difficult to establish the phylogeny of microorganisms because they are composed of genes that have moved vertically (via inheritance) or horizontally (via lateral transfer mechanisms such as conjugation) or both. Dagan et al. have applied a network analysis approach to estimate the cumulative impact of lateral gene transfer in the genomes of 181 fully sequenced prokaryotes. By examining the presence or absence of all genes and by tracing the evolutionary history of these genes on the basis of genome size, they were able to calculate the rate of lateral gene transfer and have concluded that approximately 80% of the genes in each genome appear to have been involved in lateral transfer at some point in their history. Hence, well-defined phylogenetic trees, which describe genetic relationships accurately on short-term evolutionary time scales, become rather less clearly delineated when looked at over very long time periods. -- LMZ

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 105, 10039 (2008).

Remember this when some Darwin fanatic demands that you "accept" commmon ancestry, as if it matters.

Can a gene really make you fat?

Many people have worried a lot about genetic determinism—the belief that there are master genes that control our behaviour — crime, obesity, sexuality, honesty ...

There are two separate worries here: First, is it true? If so, free will does not really exist.

More practically, what if large numbers of people believe it is true, even if it isn’t? Then those people will act as if they, and we, have no free will. They will have a bad effect on society even if they are wrong.

Fortunately, recent developments in genetics are making clear that this sort of “reductionism” — reducing everything to a single factor — is nonsense. There are no single genes that control human behaviour. Popular literature often does not catch up with new science developments very quickly, so it might be helpful to summarize a couple of key points here:

Not very long ago, as MIT science historian Evelyn Fox Keller notes in The Century of the Gene, biologists thought that if we could read the human genome, it would explain everything there was to know about a person. As Francis Crick put in in 1957, “DNA makes RNA, RNA makes protein, and proteins make us.” This was the “central dogma” of biology for nearly fifty years.

Quoting another scientist from about 15 years ago, Keller says,

Spelling out his ‘Vision of the Grail,’ Walter Gilbert wrote, “Three billion bases of sequence can be put on a single compact disc (CD), and one will be able to pull a CD out of one’s pocket and say, ‘Here is a human being; it’s me!’"

Then she adds, “Today, almost no one would make such a provocative claim.”

So why would almost no one make such a claim today? Both genes and organisms have turned out to be much more complex than anyone imagined. As Keller notes, “Indeed, the functional gene may have no fixity at all: its existence is both transitory and contingent, depending critically on the functional dynamics of the entire organism.”

As a recent article in the Guardian Education supplement explained, most genes do not do only one job:

Rather than having a single major function, most genes, like roads, probably play a small part in lots of tasks within the cell. By dissecting biology into its genetic atoms, reductionism failed to account for these multitasking genes. So the starting point for systems biologists isn't the gene but rather a mathematical model of the entire cell. Instead of focusing on key control points, systems biologists look at the system properties of the entire network. In this new vision of biology, genes aren't discrete nuggets of genetic information but more diffuse entities whose functional reality may be spread across hundreds of interacting DNA segments.

Put simply, if you have a tendency toward inactivity that causes you to gain weight, there isn’t a “gene” that makes you fat. Your tendency is likely the result of a system with hundreds of components, interacting with other systems with hundreds of components. The bad news is that it is more difficult to understand than a simple system. The good news is that it is much easier to influence than a simple system, because you can influence many different components. So biology is not destiny after all.

Of course, we can expect years of headlines about the “shoplifting gene,” the “compulsive spending” gene and so forth. Promising ideas die hard. That little word “gene” promises us absolution without ever having to say we’re sorry—or even admit that we did something bad.

To find out more about my book about the intelligent design controversy, go to By Design or by Chance?