In the News

Now that The Da Vinci Code movie has been released in the theaters, don't forget our video lecture by Ward Gasque that expounds point by point what great fiction the story is. Recent surveys reveal that 13% of Americans and 17% of all Canadians polled believed that Jesus was married and had children and 24% of French believe the story is based on facts. About 25% of those polled who read the book claimed it influenced their religious beliefs.

This is from a News Feature in Nature for May 25, 2006. "Gene" was the only concept in evolutionary theory that seemed to have a clear definition (compare with species, speciation, selection, fitness, etc.). Now the definition is being attacked as "a crude approximation" and scientists say "The degree of complexity we've seen was not anticipated."

Genetics: What is a gene?
Helen Pearson (Helen Pearson is a reporter working for Nature in New York).

Abstract
The idea of genes as beads on a DNA string is fast fading. Protein-coding sequences have no clear beginning or end and RNA is a key part of the information package, reports Helen Pearson.

Here are a few interesting quotes from this report:

"Rick Young, a geneticist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that when he first started teaching as a young professor two decades ago, it took him about two hours to teach fresh-faced undergraduates what a gene was and the nuts and bolts of how it worked. Today, he and his colleagues need three months of lectures to convey the concept of the gene, and that's not because the students are any less bright. "It takes a whole semester to teach this stuff to talented graduates," Young says. "It used to be we could give a one-off definition and now it's much more complicated.""

"An eye-opening study last year raised the possibility that plants sometimes rewrite their DNA on the basis of RNA messages inherited from generations past. A study on page 469 of this issue suggests that a comparable phenomenon might occur in mice, and by implication in other mammals. If this type of phenomenon is indeed widespread, it "would have huge implications," says evolutionary geneticist Laurence Hurst at the University of Bath, UK."

"All of that information seriously challenges our conventional definition of a gene," says molecular biologist Bing Ren at the University of California, San Diego. And the information challenge is about to get even tougher. Later this year, a glut of data will be released from the international Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project. The pilot phase of ENCODE involves scrutinizing roughly 1% of the human genome in unprecedented detail; the aim is to find all the sequences that serve a useful purpose and explain what that purpose is. "When we started the ENCODE project I had a different view of what a gene was," says contributing researcher Roderic Guigo at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona. "The degree of complexity we've seen was not anticipated."

"Today's assault on the gene concept is more far reaching, fuelled largely by studies that show the previously unimagined scope of RNA."

The folks at Panspermia.org advocate that panspermia (life seeded from outer space) is an idea that traces back to the Greeks. It is one way to deal with the lack of evidence on earth for the chemical evolution of life, but doesn't it just beg the question? What is the source of the "genetic programs" that were seeded here from outerspace? This sounds more like design theory than an answer for the problems facing chemical evolution theory. At least these folks are a little more "honest" with the data than the chemical origin of life proponents. Here are a few snippets from their into page:

"Cosmic Ancestry is a new theory pertaining to evolution and the origin of life on Earth. It holds that life on Earth was seeded from space, and that life's evolution to higher forms depends on genetic programs that come from space. (It accepts the Darwinian account of evolution that does not require new genetic programs.) It is a wholly scientific, testable theory for which evidence is accumulating."

"We are calling the union of Lovelock's Gaia with Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's expanded theory of panspermia Cosmic Ancestry. This account of evolution and the origin of life on Earth is profoundly different from the prevailing scientific paradigm — the theory challenges not merely the answers but the questions that are popular today. Cosmic Ancestry implies, we find, that life can only descend from ancestors at least as highly evolved as itself. And it means, we believe, that there can be no origin of life from nonliving matter in the past. Without supernatural intervention, therefore, we conclude that life must have always existed. Although these conclusions cut across the boundaries between science, philosophy, and religion, we believe they are grounded in good evidence. In fact, new data that support many aspects of Cosmic Ancestry are coming in rapidly."