Is this study another nail in the coffin of intelligent design? It goes into extreme detail charting genes and proteins in the human genome and shows how our complexity naturally and uneventfully evolved over time, instead of being planned by a creator.
The article goes on to explain that in complex, low population (compared to bacteria) organisms like humans that aren't quite beholden to Darwinian natural selection, duplicate genes that cause health problems are corrected over time when those genes themselves randomly mutate. This layering of gene mutation is what essentially allows complex organisms to exist.
From the article:
"In all organisms, genes get duplicated every so often, for reasons we don't fully understand," Fernandez said. "When working efficiently, natural selection eliminates many of these duplicates, which are called 'paralogs.' In our earlier work, we saw that an unusual number of gene duplicates had survived in the human genome, which makes sense given selection inefficiency in humans.
These are the potential roots for the emergence of novel protein-protein interactions, which are the hallmark of evolution in complex, multicellular species," Lynch said. "In other words, the origins of some key aspects of the evolution of complexity may have their origins in completely nonadaptive processes."
Fernandez said the research reveals how increasingly specialized proteins can evolve. He drew an analogy to a business that hires two delivery drivers that initially cover the same parts of town but eventually specialize to deliver only to specific neighborhoods.
It's interesting to think that something that may cause a disease like Alzheimer's can, in the long run, benefit our species by eventually causing a good mutation that actually cures the disease it caused.
If you do believe in intelligent design, how do you reconcile this information? Why would God(s) design us, mutate our genes to hurt millions over the course of generations, then correct the mistake in the design after a few millennium?
I'm not attacking ID, just asking some questions that I believe are relevant in light of this new evidence.
www.sciencedaily.com
(visit the link for the full news article)
