Why the origin of life remains the bane of design deniers.

Mystery of Life’s Origin Authors Reunite for Dallas Conference on Science & Faith
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

There was a wonderful turnout this past Saturday for the 2020 Dallas Conference on Science & Faith, with more than 1,400 in attendance. A highlight was the reunion of the three scientists who sparked the modern intelligent design revolution. That was in 1984 with the publication of The Mystery of Life’s Origin. The pioneering authors, biochemist Charles Thaxton, materials scientist Walter Bradley, and geochemist Roger Olsen, are pictured above (from right to left, Thaxton, Bradley, Olsen), being interviewed by Stephen Meyer about the paradox-filled intellectual world of origin-of-life researchers.

To Carry On a Legacy

The audience, which had already nearly filled the parking lot 45 minutes before the event began, were rewarded with a very entertaining conversation celebrating a new book from Discovery Institute Press. Mystery of Life’s Origin was republished today in a very substantially expanded, updated version that brings the origin-of-life controversy up to date, with new contributions by Meyer, biologist Jonathan Wells, chemist James Tour, physicist Brian Miller, and astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, and a historical introduction by Evolution News editor David Klinghoffer. The new book is graced by an updated title, The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy.

Dr. Meyer is of course one of the foremost scholars and ID proponents who have carried on the intellectual legacy of Thaxton and his colleagues. A photo from a pre-conference barbecue, at the home of Pam Bailey who manages Discovery Institute Dallas, shows Thaxton (front), and Olsen, Bradley, and Meyer:A presentation by Dr. Bradley was introduced appropriately by the director of Discovery Institute’s Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence, Robert J. Marks. His comments included the observation that as a theist, Dr. Marks is grateful to have all possible scientific explanations of the natural world, including intelligent design, available to him whereas atheists and materialists have that option arbitrarily foreclosed to them.

A Tour of Intelligent Design

The Dallas Conference was thus a tour of the theory of intelligent design from its beginnings, to today, and looking forward to the next frontier, which Stephen Meyer discussed: his forthcoming book, The Return of the God Hypothesis. The book shows that theism is the one view of reality that is consistent with the relevant scientific evidence.Political scientist and Discovery Institute Vice President John West illuminated the cultural and worldview impact of Darwinism, with its explanations of life’s wonders all rooted in suffering and death. Try fashioning a life-affirming culture from that. Michael Behe (above) discussed irreducible complexity and the provocative argument of his new book, Darwin Devolves, showing that “adaptive” evolution favored by natural selection usually involves squandering genetic information for short-term gains. In a Q&A, Dr. Behe fielded a controversial question from an audience member. The gentleman demanded to know about Behe’s plans for his facial hair. Is he going to allow his beard to really grow out, or not!?

Finally, protein chemist Douglas Axe (above) demonstrated why any modestly sophisticated system showing functional coherence sets off our design intuitions, and rightfully so. These are indicators of extremely specified, low-probability events, which justify the inference to design.

In every way, this conference was an even bigger success than our 2019 Dallas Conference. We are building on many strengths, and looking forward to 2021!

And still yet even more on design all the way down.

Surprises in Cell Codes Reveal Information Goes Far Beyond DNA

Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Information is the stuff of life. Not limited to DNA, information is found in most biomolecules in living cells. Here are some recent developments.

Sugar Code

Certain forms of sugars (polysaccharides called chitosans) trigger the immune system of plants. Biologists at the University of Münster are “deciphering the sugar code.” They describe the variables in chitosans that constitute a signaling system. 

Chitosans consist of chains of different lengths of a simple sugar called glucosamine. Some of these sugar molecules carry an acetic acid molecule, others do not. Chitosans therefore differ in three factors: the chain length and the number and distribution of acetic acid residues along the sugar chain. For about twenty years, chemists have been able to produce chitosans of different chain lengths and with different amounts of acetic acid residues, and biologists have then investigated their biological activities.

Condensed Code

DNA is becoming known as a more of a team member in a society of biomolecules. In some ways, it is more a patient than a doctor. It gets operated on by numerous machines that alter its message. One of the most important “doctors” that operates on RNA transcripts is the spliceosome, says a review article inThe Scientist about alternative splicing. This complex molecular machine can multiply the messages in the coding regions of DNA by cutting out introns and stitching coded parts called exons together in different ways.

The process of alternative splicing, which had first been observed 26 years before the Human Genome Project was finished, allows a cell to generate different RNAs, and ultimately different proteins, from the same gene. Since its discovery, it has become clear that alternative splicing is common and that the phenomenon helps explain how limited numbers of genes can encode organisms of staggering complexity. While fewer than 40 percent of the genes in a fruit fly undergo alternative splicing, more than 90 percent of genes are alternatively spliced in humans.

Astoundingly, some genes can be alternatively spliced to generate up to 38,000 different transcript isoforms, and each of the proteins they produce has a unique function.

The discovery of splicing seemed “bizarre” from an evolutionary perspective, the authors say, recalling obsolete ideas about “junk DNA.” It seemed weird and wasteful that introns were being cut out of transcripts by the spliceosome. Then, the ENCODE project found that the vast majority of non-coding DNA was transcribed, giving “these seemingly nonfunctional elements an essential role in gene expression, as evidence emerged over the next few years that there are sequences housed within introns that can help or hinder splicing activity.”

This article is a good reminder that evolutionary assumptions hinder science. Once biochemists ridded themselves of the evolutionary notion of leftover junk in the genetic code, a race was on to understand the role of alternative splicing. 

Understanding the story behind each protein in our bodies has turned out to be far more complex than reading our DNA. Although the basic splicing mechanism was uncovered more than 40 years ago, working out the interplay between splicing and physiology continues to fascinate us. We hope that advanced knowledge of how alternative splicing is regulated and the functional role of each protein isoform during development and disease will lay the groundwork for the success of future translational therapies.

Beyond Methylation

Another discovery that is opening doors to research opportunities comes from the University of Chicago. Darwin-free, they announce a “fundamental pathway” likely to “open up completely new directions of research and inquiry.” Biologists knew about how methyl tags on RNA transcripts regulate the ways they are translated. Now, Professor Chuan He and colleagues have found that some RNAs, dubbed carRNAs, don’t get translated at all. “Instead, they controlled how DNA itself was stored and transcribed.”

“This has major implications in basic biology,” He said. “It directly affects gene transcriptions, and not just a few of them. It could induce global chromatin change and affects transcription of 6,000 genes in the cell line we studied.”

Dr. He is excited about the breakthrough. The “conceptual change” in how RNA regulates DNA offers an “enormous opportunity” to guide medical treatments and promote health. Take a look at this design-friendly quote:

The human body is among the most complex pieces of machinery to exist. Every time you so much as scratch your nose, you’re using more intricate engineering than any rocket ship or supercomputer ever designed. It’s taken us centuries to deconstruct how this works, and each time someone discovers a new mechanism, a few more mysteries of human health make sense — and new treatments become available.

Genes Jumping for Joy

Remember the evolutionary myth that “jumping genes” were parasites from our evolutionary past that learned how to evade the immune system? A discovery at the Washington University School of Medicine changes that tune, saying, “‘Jumping genes’ help stabilize DNA folding patterns.” These long-misunderstood genes thought by some evolutionists to be sources of novel genetic traits actually function to provide genomic stability.

“Jumping genes” — bits of DNA that can move from one spot in the genome to another — are well-known for increasing genetic diversity over the long course of evolution. Now, new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis indicates that such genes, also called transposable elements, play another, more surprising role: stabilizing the 3D folding patterns of the DNA molecule inside the cell’s nucleus.

Lead author Ting Wang says this gives insight into why coding regions between different animals vary in structure.

“Our study changes how we interpret genetic variation in the noncoding regions of the DNA,” Wang said. “For example, large surveys of genomes from many people have identified a lot of variations in noncoding regions that don’t seem to have any effect on gene regulation, which has been puzzling. But it makes more sense in light of our new understanding of transposable elements — while the local sequence can change, but the function stays the same.

So while evolutionists had expected junk and simplicity, Wang says the opposite has occurred. “We have uncovered another layer of complexity in the genome sequence that was not known before.” Now, more discoveries are likely to flow from intelligent design’s expectation that a closer look reveals more complexity.

Mountains of Complexity

In another recent podcast at ID the Future honoring the late Phillip E. Johnson, Paul Nelson likened a graph of mounting discoveries about life to a sharply rising mountain range. Darwin proposed his theory on the flatlands, unaware of the peaks his theory would have to explain. In the last fifty years, scientists have encountered mountain after mountain of complexity in life that evolutionary theory never anticipated back out there on the flatlands. “We can’t see the top of the mountains yet, but we know that we’re still not there, and we won’t be for a long, long time,” Nelson says. As we witness scientists continuing up the mountains, we anticipate with awe more wonders of design that will likely come to light in the next decade.