Encode rejected (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, February 24, 2013, 12:44 (4292 days ago) @ David Turell

ENCODE claim that 80% of DNA is functional. Their critics attack their methods and their findings. It seems to me, from my position on the layman's fence, that if something is functional, it serves a purpose. If it is not functional, it serves no purpose. If ENCODE have explained what purposes are served by the 80%, there should be no dispute. If they haven't explained the purposes, then the figure is meaningless. But what do I know?-David, thank you for your detailed response. In it, you attack Darwin as if he should have known all about DNA and modern genetics, but of course you are really attacking those neo-Darwinists who are out to prove that evolution dispenses with God. Like many such disputes, this one seems to me pretty superficial. Whether 80% or 10% is useful, what we have is a working mechanism so complex that it defies belief in chance. If there are big bits or little bits left over (as with vestigial structures), are scientists claiming they could have done a better job, and so DNA wasn't designed? Do left-overs lessen complexity? The existence, non-existence or proportions of junk DNA prove nothing either way in the design debate. The question is how functional DNA arose in the first place. -However, you wrote: [Nanotechnicians] "may be committed to evolution as a valid process, but raise serious doubts about the nitty-gritty of basic Darwin theory. [...] Darwin's simple, common descent, natural selection and random mutation cannot possibly explain the complexity in cells." You and I and countless others agree that random mutation and gradualism are major flaws in the theory, but Darwin's great achievement was indeed to establish evolution "as a valid process", and any attack on him needs to be properly differentiated. Common descent is the "nitty-gritty", as against the then common belief in separate creation, and natural selection explains why some organs and organisms survive while others perish. These concepts are not MEANT to explain the complexity of cells. The unresolved problem within his theory is how cells are able to adapt and invent. Darwin almost certainly guessed wrong, but he knew full well how incomplete his picture was:
 
"...when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting ... I speak from experience ... will the study of natural history become! 
 A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct action of external conditions, and so forth. [...] Our classifications will come to be, as far as they can be so made, genealogies; and will then truly give what may be called the plan of creation" (Recapitulation and Conclusion, Origin).-These fields are now indeed being opened up. Interestingly for you, perhaps, he goes on once more to oppose separate creation, and thinks his theory "accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator." Atheist neo-Darwinists will never quote such statements ... or will say Darwin was appeasing his wife ... but the fact remains that he himself said evolution and religion were compatible, and towards the end of his life he also made it clear that he regarded himself as an agnostic and had never been an atheist. I do wish atheists and theists alike would stop using and abusing Darwin to suit their own purposes.