And God's Name Shall Be Called "Deoxyribonucleic Acid" (DNA)

But it will be quite disruptive if you address Him that way in your next small group prayer meeting, so I don't recommend it.

All right, this is really about Creation and Evolution. It is an update to my previous update (from 2-1/2 years ago) about my logical problems with Darwinian and Dawkinsian evolution.
_____________________

Last year I read Perry Marshall's book Evolution 2.0 Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design (2015) and it helped supply me the information that was missing from Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) and Richard Dawkin's The Greatest Show on Earth (2005).

Charles Darwin was an expert on heredity.  But he didn't know what mechanism was responsible for the changes that resulted from adaptations.  He knew nothing about chromosomes and DNA; they hadn't been discovered yet.

Richard Dawkins is an expert on genetics.  150 years after The Origin of Species, Dawkins fills in the blanks with a comprehensive dissertation on the adaptive abilities of chromosomes.  But he still maintains it is the result of random code within the genes.  He contradicts himself saying "Nature is incapable of planning" and then cites long lists of "phantasmagoric" examples of how nature does exactly that through mutual adaptation and other means.

Neither Darwin or Dawkins supply the answer to what creative forces are at work in the DNA to cause the millions of adaptive upgrades that Darwin called "the tendency toward improvement" and which are essential to get from simple to complex, from nothing to something, from dumb instinct to self-awareness and cognitive thought.

Along comes Perry Marshall in Evoluation 2.0 who takes it to the next level citing a half-dozen mechanisms that are at work within the genes to rearrange their code in adaptive and often improving structures that cause creative improvements in organisms.

And he not only speaks of the elephants in the evolutionary room, he explains how they operate.  

The second one (after "How did life begin?") is, "Where did the first genetic code come from?"

Every computer programmer knows that nothing viable ever comes from random code.  Random code produces noise.  It is impossible for it ever to re-write itself by chance.

But the hereditary code does re-write itself.  Every adaptation (or mutation) is the result of re-written code.

Genes have the ability  to re-arrange themselves in the chromosomes so that upgrades occur within the organism and carry on to the next generation.

Here is the epic change that Marshall brings to evolutionary theory:*

(begin quote)

• Neo-Darwinism says Random Mutation + Natural Selection + Time = Evolution.

• Random Mutation is noise. Noise destroys. 

• Cells rearrange DNA according to precise rules (Transposition). 

• Cells exchange DNA with other cells (Horizontal Gene Transfer). 

• Cells communicate with each other and edit their own genomes with incredibly sophisticated language. 

• Cells switch code on and off for themselves and their progeny (Epigenetics).
• Cells merge and cooperate (Symbiogenesis).

• Species 1 + Species 2 = New Species (Hybridization). We know organisms rapidly adapt because scientists produce new species in the lab every day. 

• #Evolution in 140 characters or less: Genes switch on, switch off, rearrange, and exchange. Hybrids double; viruses hijack; cells merge; winners emerge.

• Adaptive Mutation + Natural Selection + Time = Evolution 2.0

• DNA is code. All codes whose origin we know are designed.

 (end of quote)

You see, even if/when the first living cell came to being in some ancient primordial swamp, (Dawkins once called it a "happy accident")  the most important thing it had to do was reproduce.  But it couldn't even live without genetic code let alone reproduce.  Where did the code come from?

The original code had to have been created by an intelligent Designer.  There's no way around it.  Something or Somebody created the code and then wrote within it the ability to adapt itself to subsequent stimuli that bring about subsequent changes.

Apparently God programmed his creative abilities into the chromosome.

And his name shall be called, "Deoxyribonucleic Acid" (DNA)

But if you pray, maybe you should stick with, "Our Father in Heaven".

_______________

So, after all this time, my position if I have one, is essentially the same as it was decades ago and it is still a mash-up of certain elements of both creation and evolution.  I think evolution is really souped-up adaptation.   Organisms are blessed with God-given biological mechanisms that enable them to keep improving themselves.  The first genetic code was designed by an intelligent being.  In fact, information may be the first thing that ever existed.

I am still stuck on whether adaption has the super-biological ability to create whole systems that have to work together like eyesight and digestion and reproduction and a thousand other structures.  That just sounds entirely fantastic to the point of impossibility.  It may be more logical to conclude that those things were created outright. 

But I could be wrong.  

Maybe genes really are that omnipotent.

________________

*Marshall, Perry (2015). Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design (p. 172 Kindle version). BenBella Books, Inc.

Perry Marshall and his think tank offer $5M to anybody who discovers a naturally occurring code.  Claim your prize here:

http://cosmicfingerprints.com/submissions/