Turns Out Most DNA Is Not Junk After All

"The thought before the start of the project, said Thomas Gingeras, an Encode researcher from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, was that only 5 to 10 percent of the DNA in a human being was actually being used.

The big surprise was not only that almost all of the DNA is used but also that a large proportion of it is gene switches. Before Encode, said Dr. John Stamatoyannopoulos, a University of Washington scientist who was part of the project, “if you had said half of the genome and probably more has instructions for turning genes on and off, I don’t think people would have believed you.”

By the time the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, embarked on Encode, major advances in DNA sequencing and computational biology had made it conceivable to try to understand the dark matter of human DNA. Even so, the analysis was daunting — the researchers generated 15 trillion bytes of raw data. Analyzing the data required the equivalent of more than 300 years of computer time." - (read the rest here)

Listen to Dr. Fuz Rana's analysis here.

Other great analysis and the validation of the design inference here.

Epigenetics and the Image of God

I recently came across an article in the Huffington post that caught my eye. It dealt with genetics and the image of God. To be honest, I was expecting the typical reductionism that seeks to reduce humanity to our genetic information. But I was pleasantly surprised to find something else going on. Here is an excerpt:

"The reality is that recent genetics research has continued to move steadily away from any notion of genetic fatalism, highlighting the sheer complexity of the genome, and providing some fascinating examples of the ways in which our choices impact upon our own genomes. There is no gene "for" any complex human trait because in fact genes encode proteins or other types of information-containing molecules, and thousands of genes collaborate together during human development in interaction with the environment to generate the unique human individual that each person represents....Epigenetics adds further layers of variation and complexity. This refers to the chemical modifications of the DNA that cause genes to be switched on or off. It is such epigenetic modifications that generate the 220 specialized tissues of our bodies." 

Now there are many things to comment on in this article, but let me just make two brief but crucial observations.

First, DNA is not destiny. Dr. Francis Collins (former head of the human genome project) has said as much. Genes don't tell our whole story--environment and our choices matter. Genetic Fatalism is false.

Second, the mention of Epigenetics is important. There must be something beyond (epi = over) DNA that is doing the work that is programmed with the design-plan or body-plan of organisms. DNA is the paintbrush. But the epigenes (which don't seem to be a physical substance) serve as the painter. It will be very interesting to watch this field develop. Some sort of organizing principle is necessary to arrange the DNA and turn the genes on and off at the "right" times. In my view, this is yet another example of design at work. Teleology was banished from biology thanks to Charles Darwin. But could these epigenes indicate that there is a design plan after all? Stay tuned...

Think Christianly with Jonathan Morrow

TC | Web

TC | Twitter

TC | Facebook

TC | Podcast

TC | Jonathan Morrow's Books