As we explore God’s world, it turns out to be just as complicated and complex as some had suspected many centuries ago. And more so. Over the past century or so, DNA was discovered and shown to be that shadowy agent of heritability which was so important a part of the theories of Darwin and the variants of that theory developed by his followers. For a number of decades after Crick and Watson had discovered the magical shape of DNA, after others had developed sophisticated understandings of the stages of producing proteins by way of RNA, DNA was often presented as a straightforward and absolutely dominant set of recipes for constructing proteins, instructions for growth and managing metabolism, and so forth. Turn to page 124 and you’ll see how the brain proteins are made which activate neurons so that they form a frontal lobe on a human being. Or something like that.
It had always seemed unlikely to me, and I believe many others who know far more than me about this topic, that a ‘linear’ set of instructions could produce such varied and rich results as we see in living creatures on Earth. Amongst other problems is the development of complex behaviors and maybe changes to bodily structures within too small a number of generations to be the result of Darwinian selection processes. Darwin himself noted the rapid appearance of dogs with instincts leading them to search upon hearing a gun. Wildlife biologists have gathered circumstantial but solid evidence that grizzly bears in the Rockies, mostly males, became noticeably smaller after white men took up residence in the area or at least moved through regularly. There are many other interesting problems of this sort in evolutionary biology, with those working on brain and mind issues perhaps leading the pack in finding interesting problems of the sort which help to guide our exploration of our environments and help us gain a richer understanding of those environments and maybe those greater entities: the universe, the world, all of Creation.
So many interesting aspects to Creation and so little time. This short meditation, on nothing new to my thought, is motivated by the a study showing: Your Genome Structure, Not Genetic Mutations, Makes You Different.
Interesting, but I suspect that scientists are only starting to explore a realm of nature which is complex beyond the reach of our current intellectual tools. I suspect that human genomes will prove to be analogous to our greater organisms in richness and complexity.
I’ve noted before that the philosopher and historian Stephen Toulmin warned biologists back in the early 1960s that biological evolution produces ‘randomness’ because it occurs as an interface of two well-determined but independent systems: the organism and its environment. It might well prove to be the case that a similar situation holds at the interface of our genomes and our soma (our flesh and blood, roughly speaking).
Time will tell, but I’ll hazard a guess that studying a complex genome will prove to be much like studying the number line in having a extraordinary richness of patterns beyond anything our imaginations could currently reach.
Not to worry. So long as we continue to explore Creation with the proper attitudes, our imaginations will grow and strengthen as will our various tools of measurement and analysis.