Intelligent design gets one right

I once interviewed a supporter of Intelligent Design — this idea that humans are too complicated to have simply evolved on their own — and I asked him: Where does this get you? If you need to take the Bible literally, that’s your right, but how is this science? How does it change the way we would actually study biology in the lab?

He said — “the junk DNA.” “What do you mean?” I asked him. The huge stretches of DNA between the genes that don’t seem to do anything and which scientists have therefore named junk DNA, he said. An Intelligent Design scientist would assume there is no such thing as junk DNA; that it must have a purpose.

That was several years ago, and so this week I see a headline in the Washington Post: “Analysis debunks concept of junk DNA.”

It reports the results of a nine-year project to sequence not just genes, but the stuff between the genes. Four hundred scientists sequenced the 3 billion bits of information packed into each cell. The English version of Wikipedia has a mere 2.5 billion words. So that’s a lot of information. And the researchers concluded that the so-called “junk DNA” between the genes is in fact more important than the genes. Because it controls them. It turns them on and off at precise times, depending on the cell they’re in and the job to be done.

They turn out to be the brains of the cell.

Now — does this prove that God is somehow at work here? No.
But you have to admit it was pretty arrogant of traditional scientists to initially dismiss most DNA as ‘junk.’ Especially now that the so called junk turns out to be the most intelligent part of the human cell.

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