There is a wonderful scene in Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe in which a torture device called the Total Perspective Vortex is used to destroy enemies. It is a machine which no creature could possibly hope to survive.
When put into the Vortex, one is given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here.”
As Adams wrote: The Total Perspective Vortex illustrated that “In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”
Which brings me to the Discovery Institute’s latest claim on “junk DNA.”
Earlier this week, David Klinghoffer wrote a Discovery Institute piece wondering whether President Obama held off on going after Osama bin Laden to coincide with the release of Discovery fellow Jonathan Wells’ latest book, The Myth of Junk DNA.
OK, Klinghoffer is kidding on that part. It’s what we in the news biz like to call, “a news hook.”
But here’s where he gets serious:
How do you think OBL’s body was identified? By a comparison with his sister’s DNA, evidently those non-coding regions singled out by Darwin defenders, among the pantheon of other mythological evolutionary icons, as functionless “junk.” Indeed, the myth has featured in news coverage of Osama’s death.
Yes, to confirm that the man killed was indeed Osama bin Laden, forensics experts took a DNA sample and matched it with samples from half siblings, providing a 99.9 percent confidence rate that it was him.
For background, “junk DNA” is the portion of the genome that does not encode for protein sequences. As PZ Myers points out over at Pharyngula, this noncoding DNA is “subject to random changes at a higher rate than coding DNA, because it is not subject to functional constraints.” Because of this, it’s been called a genetic fingerprint, and is very useful in forensic identification.
By the way, when Susumu Ohno coined the term “junk DNA” in 1972, it was never meant to convey that the strands of DNA were worthless. Rather, it was a reference to how the non-coding genes accumulate.
As Arri Eisen, RD contributor and professor of pedagogy in Biology for Emory University’s Center for Ethics, explains, much of junk DNA is believed to be simply the accumulated detritus of our evolutionary history, such as bits of leftover viruses. But in the past several decades, scientists have discovered actual functions in some of that genetic material (such as encoding for RNAs that never become proteins).
Eisen says that as scientists continue to theorize about the possible reasons for all that spare DNA – perhaps it provides extra genetic material to shuffle in case of evolutionary emergencies – they continue to test and research those theories, discarding ones that don’t work, and try to develop answers to this vexing question, something that cannot be said of the folks at the Discovery Institute.
But somehow Klinghoffer takes the forensic test of bin Laden’s identity and argues that it disproves evolution.
“If Darwin is right, there ought to be huge swaths of ancestral garbage cluttering the genome, serving no purpose other than to identify otherwise unidentified forensic remains. So if those huge swaths turn out after all to be vitally important to the functioning organism, what does that say about Darwin’s theory? Ah, that’s exactly the question addressed in Jonathan Wells’ book.”
This, of course, is ridiculous. Darwin never wrote about “junk DNA” nor did he have any understanding of genetics. Francis Crick and James Watson didn’t discover the structure of the genetic molecule until almost a century after the publishing of Origin of Species.
So what is Klinghoffer’s point?
Let’s see how many Darwin lobbyists have the guts and honesty to acknowledge that another icon has fallen. They have not, on the whole, left themselves a lot of room for deniability on this.
This is so convoluted, it’s difficult to figure out. But I think Klinghoffer is saying that because the apparently non-functional DNA helped scientists identify bin Laden, it has a purpose. And therefore, cannot be considered junk. And while he doesn’t mention God, because, as we know, intelligent design has nothing to do with God, it means that our DNA must be ever-so-perfectly designed, almost as if it were created just to help us win the War on Terrorism.
When Restaurant at the End of the Universe hero Zaphod Beeblebrox was put into the Total Perspective Vortex readers expected him to emerge crushed—but he strolled out completely fine. The reason was that the machine merely confirmed what he had suspected all along. He really was the center of the universe.
Of course, it was later learned that Beeblebrox had used the vortex in an alternative reality, one created just for him.
