Are you a WATCH, or a RUBE GOLDBERG?

The Joyce sisters explore the Oregon wilderness, 2006

 

It is cold and windy outside and I have seized upon this fact as an excuse to stay indoors and play with my computer, rather than go outside and try to identify ducks, as consideration of  health would recommend.  (I typed that sentence rapidly and with confidence, with my head held up, just as Mrs. Basha Long taught me in 1948.  I made eight errors.  This is discouraging.  Hunt and peck for me from now on, I guess, although this crappy laptop may have something to do with it.)  Anyway…….

I am deep into junk DNA, learning gee-whiz facts about all the things that go on that depend on stuff that originates within the 98% of our genome that doesn’t code for proteins.  My guess is that much, maybe most, of the research action may lie here in the decades to come.  It is not clear to me how this new flood of knowledge will help conquer cancer – but surely, the more we know the better off we are.

One set of important “junk” actors are short segments of single-stranded RNA,  usually 20 to 23 nucleotides long.  These things help regulate which genes get “expressed” (turned into functional proteins), and in what quantities.  I wrote a blog once about a guy from the Hutch who was working in this field – he has left subsequently.  I thought he was the real deal.  Here is the blog:

http://ljb-quiltcutie.blogspot.com/2013/10/profiles-in-research-excellence-dr.html

But that is not what I am on about this blustery Sunday morning.  I have been searching for a book to supplement those by Drs. Carey and Parrington, both of which I have reviewed recently.  What I have found surprises me.  There are a number of books out there that claim junk DNA as evidence of Intelligent Design.  You know what that is, right: the notion that the overwhelming complexity of life requires a Guiding Hand.  Junk DNA has been used as a counter argument, viz – if there is a Guiding Hand, how come It was so slapdash and inefficient?  Now that the Junk has been shown to have function that anti ID argument can be set aside.  Hence, books – more theological than biological, I would bet.

I am incurably agnostic in matters of teleology and such: about the really important subjects of life and human existence I simply am not equipped to comment.  However, on Intelligent Design I do have an opinion.  As far as I can tell, biological processes are far more complicated than they need to be.  You may know the Watchmaker argument for Special Creation – that finding a fine-functioning watch in the street implies the existence of a Watchmaker.  Well, maybe so, but we are far from highly efficient Watches.  We are held together with wire and duct tape.  We use far too much energy.  We keep bad time.  We run down too quickly, and not at all gracefully 

  No one would design such a piss-poor watch on purpose, unless perhaps for amusement.  Darwin was right - but do not read too much into that statement. 

 Do you remember Rube Goldberg?  Well, if not – look him up.