Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

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Bringing scientific thought to bear on creationism

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Do positions on evolution really matter in 2008 race?

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

One Scientist's Junk Is a Creationist's Treasure
(Catherine Shaffer, Wired.com, 06.13.07)

Without your "junk DNA" you might be reading this article while hanging upside down by your tail.

That's one of the key findings of the opossum genome-sequencing project, and a surprising group is embracing the results: intelligent-design advocates. Since the early '70s, many scientists have believed that a large amount of many organisms' DNA is useless junk. But recently, genome researchers are finding that these "noncoding" genome regions are responsible for important biological functions.

The opossum data revealed that more than 95 percent of the evolutionary genetic changes in humans since the split with a common human-possum ancestor occurred in the "junk" regions of the genome. Creationists say it's also evidence that God created all life, because God does not create junk. Nothing in creation, they say, was left to chance.

"It is a confirmation of a natural empirical prediction or expectation of the theory of intelligent design, and it disconfirms the neo-Darwinian hypothesis," said Stephen Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle.

Advocates like Meyer are increasingly latching onto scientific evidence to support the theory of intelligent design, a modern arm of creationism that claims life is not the result of natural selection but of an intelligent creator. Most scientists believe that intelligent design is not science. But Meyer says the opossum data supports intelligent design's prediction that junk DNA sequences aren't random, but important genetic material. It's an argument Meyer makes in his yet-to-be-published manuscript, The DNA Enigma.

Scientists have made several discoveries about what some call the "dark matter of the genome" in recent years, but they say the research holds up the theory of natural selection rather than creationism.

In May 2007, Stanford scientists identified more than 10,000 "snippets" of DNA that are not genes but have been conserved across species throughout evolution.

When genes are conserved through natural selection, it's usually because they have important functions. In this case the researchers believe the DNA snippets are associated with early development.

"We are saying it's functional because we observe this trajectory of a hundred million years," said Gill Bejerano, an assistant professor of developmental biology and computer science at Stanford and co-author of the paper on the 10,000 DNA snippets. "If you disbelieve this process, then from your perspective, we haven't found anything interesting in the genome."

Geneticist Susumu Ohno coined the phrase "junk DNA" in his 1972 paper, "So Much 'Junk' DNA in our Genome." Four years later, Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, which popularized the idea that genes are the basis of evolutionary selection. Any DNA that was not actively trying to get to the next generation -- namely junk DNA -- was slowly decaying away through mutation, Dawkins wrote.

With scientists increasingly believing that so-called junk DNA regulates other genes, among other functions, creationists like Michael Behe, a biochemistry professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and author of the controversial new book on intelligent design, The Edge of Evolution, are more than happy to point out their errors.

"From the very beginning Darwinism thought whatever it didn't understand must be simple, must be nonfunctional," Behe said. "It's only in retrospect that Darwinists try to fit that into their theory."

Part of the difficulty in studying junk DNA is that it's impossible to prove a negative, i.e., that any particular DNA does not have a function.

That's why T. Ryan Gregory, an assistant professor in biology at the University of Guelph, believes that nonfunctional should be the default assumption. "Function at the organism level is something that requires evidence," he said.

Many scientists, including Francis Collins, author of The Language of God and director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, believe that "junk" may have been an overstatement from the beginning.

Collins is known for believing in both evolution and God, but he stops short of using junk DNA as proof of God as the master of creation.

"I've stopped using the term," Collins said. "Think about it the way you think about stuff you keep in your basement. Stuff you might need some time. Go down, rummage around, pull it out if you might need it."

"Obviously 'junk' is pretty much a colloquial term," said Stanford's Bejerano. "There's no scientific definition of what is junk."