Origins: Orphan Genes Puzzle

imagine having to assemble a Dictionary of the English language but every time you open a new book you find words that you've never seen before many of the words a unique found only in that book and nowhere else likewise in genetics hundreds of thousands of new genes are being discovered by DNA sequencing and their beginnings are a major puzzle coming up on today's edition of origins orphan genes puzzle but dr. Paul Nelson [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to origins I'm ray Heiple it's an honor to be your host today during this program we showcase interesting guests who present evidence from science along with other important facts validating the truth of creation and the accuracy of the Bible our guest today dr. Paul Nelson studied evolutionary theory and the philosophy of science at the University of Chicago he's currently a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute and adjunct professor in science and religion at Biola University Paul has been involved in the intelligent design debate internationally for more than two decades and we're happy to have you with us Paul it's great to be here so we're going to be looking at orphan genes I know what orphans are but what are orphan genes well orphan genes are sequences of DNA that code for protein but they have no apparent relatives that is when you align them you can't find any matches in the genetic dictionaries of life and they create a real puzzle for evolution but before we get there let me give you a little thought experiment let's suppose we are sitting in a Starbucks here in Pittsburgh and I say to you I can walk to New Kensington in one day and that's about 20 miles and you say yeah I know what that would require you can do that that's possible all right same Starbucks a week later and I tell you you know what I walked to Buffalo now that's 215 miles and you say okay but never in one day or in wintertime or in wintertime you're gonna need shelter you're gonna need a change of socks at least probably more than one it's possible not in one day only with help all right same Starbucks another week later I tell you I walked to Honolulu okay now you might you know grab your cell phone and say no I I know good psychiatrist okay there's no way no matter how much time you have it's over 4600 miles and there's this little body of water on the west coast yeah on the west coast of the United States all right so let's apply this to biology all right with a question like can you walk to New Kensington versus can you walk to Honolulu we have ways of answering that all right what do we do well we say what do you need to walk right what is the mechanism of human walking required so we have some knowledge of the process itself but we also have accurate maps of the terrain so we can assess my claims about walking to New Kensington versus Honolulu with respect to everything we know about the world we can do the same thing with biology what's possible versus impossible and why all right so what do organisms require just for their normal function and reproductive capability and we have maps so to speak of where organisms are located with respect to each other in terms of their genetics development anatomy and so forth so this is the same kind of information we can use as in the walking case to evaluate claims particularly about evolution note knowing our abilities and knowing the terrain same things same things an organism or walk right same thing I'm with you so far let's take an example real close to home our relationship to chimps all right now here is a protein that's circulating in your bloodstream right now it's an oxygen carrier this particular protein if you look at it in a human here's the sequence now these single letters represent amino acids so this is the amino acid sequence to build that protein in humans that's how many amino acids in just that one press that Delta hemoglobin right it's a complicated molecule here's the same sequence in a chimp they're identical except for one difference right here we have a methionine there they have a valine there otherwise these two proteins are exactly the same between chimps and humans but you know there are many proteins in chimps and humans that are exactly the same here's a partial list we could fill this board many times which raises an interesting question if down at the nuts and bolts level were so similar in terms of our genes and proteins why don't we look like this because we don't right I mean I know some rather hairy people but they don't look like that if you're lucky enough you look like this right I'm not but let's do a little comparison here between our two biologies if you look just at our Anatomy there are enormous and very interesting differences between chimps and humans for instance we have a chin they don't they have no eyebrows we do we have an opposable thumb lets us do this we have great dexterity they don't and on and on in fact summon atomists have said you can distinguish a bone in a chimp from any bone in a human just by visual inspection every bones a little different every bones a little different and some are very different you run through this list and you see there are many many behavioral differences between our two species the puzzle is how can that be if we are genetically nearly identical to chimps this disconnect has been a real puzzle on evolutionary theory for several decades in fact I remember as a student reading this paper was published in science in 1975 by two researchers at Berkeley University what they pointed out is if you look at the genes and proteins of chimps and humans in many cases they're identical or nearly identical yet the biology of the two species in terms of their behavior their Anatomy and so forth is quite different and they said evolution must be occurring at two levels because down at the nuts-and-bolts we look like we're largely the same you rise up and look at the differences we're very strikingly disparate now there's a cynical view that you can take of this Jonathan marks at the University of North Carolina says look if the overall biology the animals tells you they're very different and the genetics tells you that they're nearly identical it follows that the genetics is telling you something relatively trivial about the overall biology so as he says look if you look at the genes and proteins and it says you should be in the same species they're telling you the wrong thing I think he's right in a certain level but I'm not going to take the cynical view I want to take a different view and look at what evolution is as a theory evolution is not primarily a theory of similarity many people think it is but really similarity just gives you more of the same thing evolution fundamentally is a theory of transformation what it says is it's possible to go from species a to species B by some natural pathway where you have major changes occurring you're transforming that species so when we look at Darwin himself Darwin actually only used the word evolution once to refer to his own theory he had a different name it's longer but in many respects it's more accurate he called his theory descent with modification the reason I like this name is it captures both elements of what any evolutionary theory would need to explain think about it this way you've got descent that's where you get your similarity but that's not enough because as I said similarity just gives you more of the same thing what you need is modification you've got to transform that species over time and the joint or the conjunction of these two is what really gives you evolution so the descent is hereditary descent from one generation to the next to the next you know we use the word descent for that right but over time there's got to be this transformation there's got to be transformation or it's not evolution at the same time right at the same time both things have to be happening now this is important because Darwin himself knew that if this failed if you didn't have a mechanism to change living things you wouldn't have evolution as he understood it in fact he proposed to test in the Origin of Species saying some of these transformations might be biologically impossible here's how he put it he said if any any feature of a living thing could be demonstrated that it could not have arisen by numerous successive slight modifications my theory would absolutely break down does he mean that his whole theory are just for that particular modification well it really applies to the whole theory because what you would say is here's a feature of a living thing that really exists and Darwin said all living things are connected so if some living thing is isolated from the rest of life where did it come from so it's very important for Darwin that everything that we see about organisms can be fit into one great tree of life so this was and continues to be a very serious test for evolution what seems like if even one thing could be found that you couldn't explain then it wouldn't it would back it everything else that's right it would be a significant challenge because this aspect of evolution would fail and descent alone doesn't give you evolution as Darwin understood it it's often said that evolution and Darwin's sense of a single tree of life as an established fact right you just don't doubt it actually in 2009 new scientist a major science journal in the United Kingdom had a cover story Darwin was wrong now that got a lot of attention and many evolutionary biologists were very upset they said we'll never have anything to do with this journal again they're just pandering to creationists but Graham Lawton the science writer who wrote the piece defended himself online he said look I'm just reporting on what's happening with in evolutionary theory itself many senior evolutionary biologists are bailing out of Darwin's single tree picture you can kind of see it here in this nice illustration you've got a root a common ancestor to all of life and all the rest of life is going to spring from that root these biologists who are up rooting Darwin's tree as the article puts it have said you know what that's not true anymore so if we want we can go into a little more detail on this and talk about why orphaned genes and similar puzzles have caused Darwin's tree to be uprooted before we do Paul we have to take a break you're going to want to stay with us modern evolutionary theory says Charles Darwin was right and yet we have this magazine that says he was wrong find out the solution to this when we [Music] welcome back to origins we're talking to dr. Paul Nelson who's been sharing some fascinating things about orphan genes Paul we left off looking at this cover story of New Scientist magazine saying that Darwin was wrong shocked a lot of people I imagine it shocked me to see that and the funny thing is when you look at the back story to the story so to speak the science writer Graham Lawton says look I was just reporting on what's going on with in evolutionary theory itself for instance the work of this man Carl Woese he was a he's dead now he died a few years ago but he was a molecular biologist at the University of Illinois and very prominent member of the National Academy of Sciences and towards the end of his career he was quite outspoken to say biology has to go beyond what he called the doctrine of common descent and that capital D there that's not a typo he used that word in a sense of something standing in the way of scientific understanding was he referring to Darwin's theory when he said those well he was referring to that single tree picture where all of life Springs from what's called the last Universal common ancestor sort of your ultimate grandparent and mine so if we look at our lineages probably you have northern European ancestry I do too we would converge to kin in common remarkably recent in human history so if you did your genealogy and I did mine we would find that we have relatives in common somewhere in northern Europe within just a few hundred years in fact for any person in the audience we can start tracing those lineages back and you'll discover you're related to every other human being on this planet remarkably recent in human history what evolutionists agree with that they sure would but they would say not only are you related to every human being you're related to chimps and your dog and in fact the bacteria in your gut now what was was saying is that singletree picture has broken apart at the bottom the so-called last Universal common ancestor or Luca it's as often abbreviated never existed and there must have been multiple trees that to be independently of each other early in the history of life now what kind of evidence is leaning him to this sort of position well let's look at it one thing that we didn't know that nobody knew when I was a student was just how diverse genetics is on planet earth in the mid 90s automated DNA sequencing this is a somewhat older generation DNA sequencer didn't exist imagine they're smaller today they're smaller in fact within our lifetimes high school biology classes will have DNA sequencers about this big Wow and they will for a semester project sequence the DNA of a species no one's ever looked at before so the technology has become so inexpensive and so rapid that this is not an exaggeration it will be within the grasp of a high school AP biology class so this is an old machine I need to update the slide but the point is this technology didn't exist when evolutionary theory was formulated and what it has shown us is something really astonishing now this curve should blow you away okay when you explain it to me maybe it will all right actually you can see it only goes to two thousand eight now this line goes up and off the screen what this represents is the DNA information stored in GenBank GenBank you can think of well it is literally a computer database but you can think of it as the dictionary of genes very much like a dictionary of words so if I gave you the task of writing in English dictionary you would have a curve that would be initially similar to this where you'd get a lot of new words that you'd never seen before but eventually your curve would flatten out and you come back to me after let's say a decade and you would say look I have got and assembled a comprehensive dictionary of the English language right there just aren't any more new words defined and even the new phrases that I find like hip-hop right hip-hop it's the conjunction of two words that were previously present in English or ripoff right I'm old enough to remember when Ripoff entered the English language because hippies in the 60s needed a word to describe how felt when someone sold them about it bag of oregano right instead of weed okay to be blunt about it so man he ripped me off will rip and off had an existence in English prior to alright so your dictionary is gonna you know be complete what's happening with genes on the other hand is this curve is going up out of sight what that means is that the genetic words if you think of it that way in biology is vastly greater the number is vastly greater than anyone realized so they're finding brand new words so all the time all the time so this is what I just said before the mid-1990s and that DNA sequencing technology we had no idea we had no idea just how diverse things are and one of the phenomena if you will that's causing this dictionary to grow so rapidly is what are known as orphan genes these are genes that are found in a single species you look in another species they're not there in fact you can take these genes and compare them to the whole of life and you don't find any matches that's why they're called orphans because their putative evolutionary parents can't be found now let me show you how this is discovered little cartoon here here's a sequence of DNA that we've just determined right took it from a new species we're looking at and long strings of a a's t's c's and g's long enough to code for a protein we determine our sequence and then we submit it to GenBank so here's our genetic dictionary and just as if I gave you an English word you've never seen before you'd go to your Funk & Wagnalls or your oxford english dictionary and look for the match in this case we get a match so we align these sequences base pair by base pair this one codes through a ribosomal protein so does that one now this one can join the dictionary too with orphans that doesn't happen we look for the matches and they're just not there this clearly codes for protein because it has the features of a gene that codes for protein but when we put it in the dictionary no match so even with the human genome being totally completed right and they have mapped our all of our DNA and throughout all of our cells there's wood they still find something that wouldn't you still find orphan genes in fact orphan genes are present in every species that that's been looked at so far in some cases there are a very large percentage of the DNA of that organism and they're new within that generation like you don't see them in the previous generation well they would be present anytime that you could take a sample but remember when we're looking at genes we're looking at just the organisms present today so we can only infer about the past but as you look at the total number of orphans they vastly exceed the shared genes so some genes are shared between species but the orphans in total number greatly exceed that in fact as these authors say in Germany it's the number is much greater than that for known gene families and we find them everywhere in enormous numbers so this little creature of the water flea Daphnia had its genome sequenced recently and 36 percent of its genes show no homology that is no similarity to genes in GenBank or other databases over a third of its genes are found just in this creature just in that creature or look at this one this tick and by the way on a quiet afternoon in heaven I'm gonna ask God what he had in mind with ticks okay really don't like them all right look at the number here 71% of its genes have no matches to other data in other databases and these genes aren't just peripheral players all right salamanders many species can regenerate their limbs it's a remarkable feature right limb regeneration in salamanders is apparently mediated by an orphan gene does that mean they don't know what gene does it no they know what gene does it but when they compare that gene to other amphibians or to other animals they don't find it elsewhere so this key feature of this species is found just in that species and the gene that does it and it's protein product appears to be just in these guys or another example freshwater polyp Hydra which some people remember from high school biology this critter here it's very form its anatomy is specified by a species specific orphan sequence so bottom line is these genes are present all throughout life and there's a problem for Darwin's picture if we start with the last Universal common ancestor we can define a radius that extends from that point and this line is set by what do organisms need how much mutations are possible and how much time is available that gives us a sphere within which if evolution is true we should find all known genes and protein products but this space is only a tiny fraction of what's available to an intelligent designer all right put it down there a designer can go anywhere he wants in this larger space he's not bound by that that radius so to speak so we can let the day to settle it if we map a new species look at its DNA is it going to be in here or will it be located out here so I'm very very excited about this because it's a place where the predictions of intelligent design and the predictions of Darwinian theory radically diverge what evolutionists say about the orphan gene it's a major puzzle it's a major puzzle currently unsolved and it's something I get very enthusiastic about because frankly I think it's a place where new discoveries in science are lending great support to an intelligent sign picture of life now there are more details to work out but I think it's tremendously exciting well where do we go from here after you've mapped the genes of different organisms what do they do with the orphan genes do they just go into the bank separately well they go into the databank and in fact I'm involved with a research project right now called orphan bass what we are trying to get a comprehensive look at all these sequences and what they might mean for biology do you ever find where there was an actual likeness to another orphan sure sometimes orphans turn out to have relatives then they can no longer be classified as orphans but the total number of orphans known continues to rise in a dramatic way not catching no no we're not catching up the dictionary of life gets bigger and bigger and bigger every time a new sequences are a new gene or a new species is looked at you know I teach apologetics at a Christian high school and one of the things that I like to try to impress upon the kids that apologetics in evangelism are not the same thing that's right evangelism is preaching the gospel witnessing to Christ but apologetics is defending the truth claims of Scripture and defending the truth of God in the world as we see it as we perceive it we've almost given up on the world what do you think has happened I think the problem is that many Christians are intimidated by science and this wasn't always the case if you look back at the history of science prior to Darwin much of the very best work was done by Christians but with the middle of the 19th century the philosophy of materialism or naturalism comes to dominate scientific thinking and we still live in that intellectual world a world in which it said science can only use natural laws and chance processes to explain what we see so if science for many people has that character they feel like well that belongs to some other philosophy I will draw my understanding of God from his word and from my from my church fellowship and I'll let this other worldview have the natural world I think that's a terrible surrender that's a terrible cost to pay and Christians need to have the confidence and and really eagerness to go back to the natural world and reclaim it for a theistic worldview if this world was created by a mind like mine but vastly more powerful I have some hope when I go out and do the hard work of research that I'm gonna discover what that mind did well that's been fascinating stuff I really appreciate you coming with us Baal and I appreciate you joining us as well we've seen some compelling evidence that random mutations simply are not able to account for the complexity of life even at the genetic level that there are these orphan jeans out there that evolutionists really don't know what to do it but when we look at the Scriptures and we see there is an intelligent designer then it confirmed something that we like to say on this program and that is we know what the Bible says is true and the proof is all around you thanks for joining us for this edition of origins we'll see you next time thank you for watching this edition of origins for a DVD of this series you can order online or send a twelve dollar donation to cover shipping and handling and right to origins program number 1809 cornerstone Network wall Pennsylvania one five one four eight this presentation was made possible by the faithful prayers and financial support of you our cornerstone family [Music]

Channel: Cornerstone Television Network

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Id: DhARc0EZsVs

Length: 26min 31sec (1591 seconds)

Published: Mon May 07 2018