The limitations of science (The limitations of science)

by dhw, Sunday, June 27, 2010, 12:37 (5262 days ago) @ George Jelliss

My thanks to George for drawing our attention to Richard Dawkins' radio series on 'The Age of the Genome'. George will be surprised to hear that I thought Dawkins did a good job. But as a neutral listener, what struck me most forcibly was the enormous complexity of the task. It took more than 2000 people working in 20 labs no less than 13 years to sequence the human genome, and it would take 80 years to read the sequence of letters. Again and again, Dawkins quite rightly emphasizes what a huge achievement the decoding is. -And the job is still not finished. One interviewee thought that about 90% of DNA is junk, but Dawkins made a very pertinent remark, along the lines of maybe we just don't know what it does. And the fact is that some scientists talk of "dark matter" in the genome, because they are still far from figuring out how the different parts interact, and it is this interaction that leads to the vast differences between humans and, for instance, worms and mice. -In relation to junk DNA, Dawkins draws a parallel with computers, pointing out that 90% of his computer's hard drive consists of junk. Of course it would not occur to him, or possibly to other listeners, that the computer is the product of intelligent design. Nor would it occur to him that all the above statistics and all the unsolved mysteries make it increasingly difficult for a neutral observer to accept that the genome is the product of mindless globules of matter having assembled themselves without any knowledge of what they were doing. It's an astonishing scientific feat to have unravelled the code. But doesn't that make the assembly of the code even more astonishing?