Thinking to Believe

I just love Greg Koukl!  In his most recent issue of Solid Ground he provides a wonderful response to a challenge atheist Michael Shermer likes to lodge against theistic moral objectivists: “If there was no God, would you still be good?”   

Shermer expects an affirmative answer from his theist detractors.  If theists would be good even without God, he reasons, then God is not necessary for morality as the theist claims.  While this is a clever rhetorical device, it misses the point entirely.  The theist’s argument is not that one must believe in God to behave in ways people generally consider “good.”  Our argument is that if God does not exist, there is no such thing as “goodness” at all.  As an individual or as a culture we might prefer to help a grandmother cross the street as opposed to running her over with our car, but neither behavior is morally superior to the other.  All human acts are just molecules in motion, and the last I checked, neither molecules nor motion come in “good” and “bad” varieties.  Morality is not a quality of matter, but of mind.  

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I just finished reading an article in The Guardian by Oliver Burkeman regarding the changing face of evolutionary theory.  He discusses a book by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (What Darwin Got Wrong) that challenges the coherency of natural selection.  Fodor notes that Darwin assumed natural selection “selects for” specific traits in an organism.  He finds two problems with this.  First, natural selection is a mindless, blind process, so it cannot “select for” anything. 

Second, there is no way to determine that a specific trait was “selected for,” rather than merely “selected.”  Traits are correlated together in an organism, and thus one cannot single out a specific trait to say “X was selected for by natural selection.”  Not every trait is adaptive, and thus not every trait will be “selected for.”  Some will merely be selected by default.  For example, why think the Cheetah’s spots were “selected for” by natural selection?  It very well could be that the Cheetah was selected by natural selection because of its speed, and its spots were merely “selected” in the process – coming along for the ride if you will.  Organisms qua organisms are selected, not specific traits. 

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In the human genome, only 1.5% of our 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA codes for proteins.  For a long time evolutionists though the other 98.5% was “junk” DNA: DNA that was preserved in the genome, but had no function; the byproduct of billions of years of aimless mutations.  Over the past seven years, however, scientists keep discovering more and more function for this “junk.”  For example, it has been discovered that ~90% of our genome codes for RNA products.  Junk DNA also:

1. Regulates DNA replication
2. Regulates transcription
3. Marks sites for programmed rearrangement of genetic material
4. Influences the proper folding and maintenance of chromosomes
5. Controls the interactions of chromosomes with the nuclear membrane
6. Controls RNA processing, editing, and splicing
7. Modulates translation
8. Regulates embryological development
9. Repairs DNA
10. Aids in fighting disease^[1]

And now, biologist Richard Sternberg has brought my attention to a very interesting find related to a specific kind of “junk” DNA called Short Interspersed Nuclear Elements (SINEs).  SINEs are mobile DNA that can insert themselves in various locations within the genome, and are thought to be functionless according to evolutionary biologists.

The rat and mouse are said to have diverged from one another 22 million years ago.  Since that time, each is thought to have experienced hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of SINE insertion events.  Given so many insertion events, we would expect for the location of SINEs to be very different in the mouse genome than in the rate genome (in the same way we would expect a moon that split in two 22 million years ago to evidence a very different asteroid bombardment pattern on its surface).  And yet, when we compare the location of SINEs in the mouse and rate genomes this is what we find:

They are virtually identical!  This is not what we would expect from a degenerative process like mutations and random insertions over millions of years.  We would expect radical divergence, not a nearly-identical pattern.  While the SINE sequences are not the same in the rat and mouse genomes, the placement of the SINEs is nearly identical (and they are concentrated in gene-coding regions of the genome).

How do we account for this pattern?  Can it be the result of a degenerative process?  Surely not.  Patterns are indicative of design, and hence purpose.  Contrary to the expectations of evolutionary biologists, SINEs do have purpose and function, even if we are only beginning to understand them.