According to the scientific definition, a gene is a distinct unit of information, in the form of a specific pattern of nucleotides that comprise part of a chromosome. Roughly translated into English, genes are packets or sequences of DNA (information) that specifically code for one protein, whereas a genome is the full genetic code, or set of rules, for a given organism.
For example, the genome of a primate will have specific genes that define the development of fur, arms, and legs, while the genome of a bird will have certain genes that cause development of beaks, feathers, and wings. Both organisms will have genes responsible for developing heart, lungs, eyes, and other internal organs that almost all animals share in common, while also having enough genetic material that a single individual can be uniquely identified out of millions of other people. Only identical twins share the same DNA, but even they can be uniquely identified through their fingerprints. DNA is basically a recipe for how to create an organism from scratch.
The average layperson may not be able to recognize an individual gene under a microscope, but any two experts in genetics should be able to identify the specific pattern of a known gene. Most of us have seen enough TV shows like NCIS and CSI delving into forensic police investigative work to know that leaving DNA evidence at the scene of a crime is just about as damning as a voluntary confession—unless the perpetrator can convince the jury that the evidence was planted in an attempt to frame them, the trial will inevitably end with a verdict of guilty.
Incidentally, there has been a trend among the atheist intelligentsia to try to explain away or excuse bad (and even criminal) behavior as being as the result of determinism, meaning through a combination bad genetics and bad environment. The natural alternative is free will – a criminal chooses evil over good. The problems with determinism are that it absolves the guilty as not really being responsible for their crime because they allegedly had no choice but to commit because of their DNA and environment yet allows for the punishment of that perpetrator anyway.
II freely confess that I have a great deal of difficulty reconciling the idea that criminals aren’t really responsible for their behavior because circumstances beyond their control have put them in position to commit their crimes and have referred to such thinking as mental masturbation in the past. According to atheist writer and neuroscientist Sam Harris, rapist and murderer Stephen Hayes had no choice except to bludgeon Dr. William Petit in his sleep, murder his wife, rape their two daughters, and then burn the children alive. According to Harris’ disturbing worldview, in some hypothetical scenario where someone could exchange his body and personality molecule-by-molecule with Stephen Hayes, that person would become a rapist and murderer.
The argument is actually about as silly as the idea of calling a gene “selfish”, but that’s exactly what renowned writer and zoologist Richard Dawkins has done. The former professor at Oxford and author of books such as The God Delusion, The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow and The Greatest Show on Earth produced his seminal work more than thirty years ago, titled The Selfish Gene. What exactly did Dawkins say that was so brilliant and made him so famous for writing The Selfish Gene? Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out the best way to answer to that question. I’m somewhat flummoxed. For a very smart man, he made some alarmingly careless mistakes in his thought processes.
In order to reach the point of being able to speak with authority about his field of expertise, Dawkins simply glosses over several crucially important steps with silly, sophomoric rhetoric. For example, Chapter 2 titled “The Replicators” begins, “In the beginning was simplicity. It is difficult enough explaining how even a simple universe began.” To describe our universe as simple, one must be either painfully ignorant of what physicists and cosmologists have said about the origin of the universe or deliberately trying to deceive the reader for some ulterior motive.
The universe has been smaller, but the problem of mere existence has never been simple; the challenge of bringing this particular universe into existence is actually quite complex. Fine-tuning and other specific characteristics make the origin problem quite difficult to resolve, as a matter of fact. In order to be able to compete with the concept of intelligent design or special creation, hypotheses such as the multiverse, quantum foam, and string theory have been conceived in an attempt to resolve the probability problems associated with creating a fine-tuned universe from nothing that is capable of supporting complex living organisms. Some atheists even vehemently argue that the universe could not have been created from nothing, even though (atheist) physicist Lawrence Krauss has written a successful book titled A Universe From Nothing.
Furthermore, there is an equally if not even more formidable problem that must be resolved before Darwinism can even come into play—abiogenesis, or the origin of life formed from inanimate matter. Professor Dawkins would do well to listen to this two-hour lecture from Dr. James Tour on the origin of life, and then he would realize that he has been grotesquely oversimplifying a problem he has assumed can be solved without requiring divine intervention. The statistical probability of our universe forming as the result of random chance and unguided processes is astronomically low—the most generous figure usually cited is 1 in 10300 power, which is fraction of a percentage point so small it could be considered virtually impossible, sort of like flipping a fair coin several million times and always landing on heads. The odds against successful abiogenesis cannot be improved, they can only get worse because abiogenesis requires a successful universe in order to support the life created.
The origin of life problem is equally as difficult to solve as a universe created from nothing given the initial scarcity of resources, and other challenges such as entropy, racing against the blind processes trying to create celestial objects or living organisms. Whatever Nature might be trying to build through a combination of luck and resource availability working toward an undirected goal would be under constant attack from other natural processes racing to undo any progress that had been made, through decay. Dawkins writes, “I take it on as agreed that it would be even harder to explain the sudden springing up, fully armed, of complex order–life, or a being capable of creating life. Darwin’s theory of natural selection is satisfying because it shows a way that simplicity could change into complexity, how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they end up manufacturing people. Darwin provides a solution, the only feasible one so far suggested, to the deep problem of our existence.”
In reality, the only reason that Dawkins makes such an audacious claim is that his personal bias toward atheism blinds him to the fatal flaws in his argument. While it is true that an individual cell is not as complex as a human being, it is ludicrous to suggest that means the individual cell is simple. Individual cells are factories, and Dawkins knows this.
In The Selfish Gene he wrote, “The things we see around us, and which we think of as needing explanation — rocks, galaxies, ocean waves — are all, to a greater or lesser extent, stable patterns of atoms.” Indeed. At least on that one point we can agree. They are most certainly patterns. And here is where my argument gets a bit aggressive, because my field of expertise in my early career was computers—patterns are always produced by intelligent processes. Otherwise, they aren’t really a pattern, but merely the illusion of a pattern. Please allow me to explain by way of an illustration.
Consider the following sequence of numbers: 00000111. To the average person, that sequence probably means nothing. However, to a computer (or former computer programmer) that sequence of numbers represents the number 7 in ASCII machine language. The pattern conveys information.
Change one value from one to zero, 00000110, and the information conveyed is changed from 7 to 6 according to any process that understands it is interpreting ASCII sequences. Without intelligence applied to the pattern or sequence, it becomes nothing more than a meaningless string of zeros an ones. On this same website I have compared DNA to computer machine language on numerous occasions in the past.
In my professional opinion, DNA is the ultimate source code. It is both more restrictive and more robust than machine language, and it conveys more information. Digital information has been easily encoded into and decoded from DNA. The comparison is not only valid, it has been confirmed by experiment.
Remember, genes only contain enough information to code for one protein. Like our ASCII number 7, only one pattern represents that value, but the entire sequence of eight numbers (called bits) is organized into one group that is processed into information called a byte. Every time I type another character on my keyboard, another sequence of zeroes and ones is stored that represents the new character. Bytes may be grouped together to digitize more and more complex pieces of information. Not only is every word in this article stored inside the computer as a sequence of zeros and ones, even the photo of Richard Dawkins has been converted into a grouped and packaged series of zeros and ones, because that’s the only thing a computer understands: zeros and ones.
In a fascinating and disturbing novel titled Prey, author Michael Crichton describes the human body as basically a swarm of cooperative and intelligent cells. Each cell performs a significant function contributing to the whole body, not unlike the work within an ant colony. Brain cells function differently than liver cells, but all work cooperatively for the benefit of the entire human body…assuming everything is working normally, of course.
Dawkins compared genetic function to computer programming, an analogy well understood by this writer. He writes, “…genes too control behavior of their survival machines, not directly with their fingers on puppet strings, but indirectly like the computer programmer…why are [genes] so passive? Why don’t they grab the reins and take charge from moment to moment?”
Genes can’t “take charge” for the same reason they aren’t really selfish–genes don’t have brains. They don’t think or feel, any more than a computer line of code has feelings or emotions, which is to say not at all. The pattern represents a set of instructions, but the ability to act on those instructions requires more than the pattern itself. From the moment an egg becomes fertilized, a unique blueprint for a new organism is formed.
Richard Dawkins doesn’t really mean that genes are selfish in the same sense that humans are selfish. Within a genome, there might be couple of different variants of a particular gene, in a sequence known as an allele. The “selfish gene” actually refers to how certain alleles become dominant in a given genome over time, in a gene-centered explanation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. For example, in the human genome, a certain gene determines hair color. Different alleles code for brown, black, blonde, or red hair, and determine whether the hair is straight or curly.
Clearly, Mendel’s work in genetics has become the crucial element of Darwin’s theory, giving it some power of explanation for how clearly different types of organism could come into existence. However, it seems quite inadequate when one realizes that sexual reproduction is the primary means of communicating genetic information, and if Darwin’s theory is the best explanation for Mendel’s scientific evidence, humans are not only related to other types of animals due to sex, they are also related to plants, molds, and fungi by means of of sexual reproduction.
In other words, sexual reproduction allegedly explains the relationship between humans, apes, and bananas. That is an explanation, in fact it currently is the official explanation. But is it the only explanation? Of course not. Created on purpose by intelligence is the best explanation, and the only explanation that makes any sense. Why? Because creation explains the appearance of design as more than illusion.
If God does not exist, design does not exist, and accidents explain order.
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