Dembski Proposes Research Program, Cordova Misapplies It

Dembski Proposes Research Program, Cordova Misapplies It

I’ve been saying for a while (and I’m not alone) that if the ID folks want to be taken seriously by the scientific community, they need to do some actual, you know, research. So I was taken aback when William Dembski actually
suggested a line of research (scroll down to “Steganography”):

Consider now the following possibility: What if organisms instantiate designs that have no functional significance but that nonetheless give biological investigators insight into functional aspects of organisms. Such second-order designs would serve essentially as an “operating manual,” of no use to the organism as such but of use to scientists investigating the organism.
…

While it makes perfect sense for a designer to throw in an “operating manual” (much as automobile manufacturers include operating manuals with the cars they make), this possibility makes no sense for blind material mechanisms, which cannot anticipate scientific investigators. Research in this area would consist in constructing statistical tests to detect such second-order designs (in other words, steganalysis). Should such second order designs be discovered, the next step would be to seek algorithms for embedding these second-order designs in the organisms. My suspicion is that biological systems do steganography much better than we, and that steganographers will learn a thing or two from biology — though not because natural selection is so clever, but because the designer of these systems is so adept at steganography.

Okay, so this is the merest sketch outline of a research program, nothing more than pointing and saying, “Y’know, there might be something interesting over yonder.” But I’ll cut him some slack because it isn’t completely wacked, as creationist ideas go. Plus, it implies some things about the Designer and the design:

• The steganographic information embedded in organisms must be of a type that can survive the mixing up of the genome during sex, to say nothing of mutations.
• Presumably this means that the steganographic information is spread out in multiple parts of the genome, which tends to imply a designer who designs genomes wholesale, rather than just tinkering with a protein here and a flagellum there from time to time.
• The designer finds it convenient to embed a “user manual” in the organisms it has designed.
• This implies that the designer(s) tinkers with the organisms from time to time, and need to look up the documentation in the field. After all, to reuse Dembski’s analogy, car manufacturers put manuals in cars for the others’ benefit, not their own. So who needs to see the “manual” in our genome?

Actually, let me take back some of that slack: this was reported on Uncommon Descent yesterday, but the talk dates back to 2002. As far as I know, no reseach has been done in this area since it was proposed, four years ago, not even the paper-and-pencil stuff like coming up with a research methodology, some criteria for recognizing these second-order effects when and if they’re seen, and so forth. Heck, there are plenty of sequenced genomes online, so they could’ve been writing code and reporting preliminary results by now.

At any rate, Salvador Cordova
reported this at Uncommon Descent, then proceeded to get it all wrong:

Geron [Corporation] noticed a correlation between the “age” of a cell (its closeness to senescence) and the amount of junk DNA at the end of a chromosome (telomeres). They must have thought something like, “it’s always hard to tell cause from effect, but ‘what the heck’, let’s see if playing with telomere length will affect longevity”

What they did was work the hTRT gene that affected telomere length, and then “voila”, the cell became immortalized! The junk DNA essentially served as a road map for the researchers. How hard would it have been to uncover this without “junk DNA”!

Geron’s work may lead to important medical advances in curing burn victims and spinal chord victims and help us understand the keys to longevity. Thus, already, some biotech firms are inadvertently happening upon the “user manual” qualities of junk DNA as Dembski envisioned in his steganography speech.

The nucleus of a cell contains pairs of chromosomes — long, tangled strands of DNA. There are 23 pairs in humans. At the ends of the chromosomes are sequences called
telomeres. A telomere is a sequence of TTAGG, repeated a bunch of times, that appears at the ends of each chromosome. Telomeres help prevent the ends of the chromosome from fraying and other damage. When a cell divides, ribosomes latch onto the ends of the chromosomes. They then start moving along the chromosome, copying it as they go along.

(Aside: humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes; chimpanzees and gorillas have 24. But if you take chromosomes 2p and 2q from a chimp and lay them alongside human chromosome 2, you’ll
find telomere remnants
in the human chromosome at the same place as in the chimp chromosomes. This is strong evidence that chromosomes 2p and 2q fused together at some point after our lineage split off from chimpanzees.)

If you want to copy a tape on a reel-to-reel player, you can’t copy the entire tape: you need to use some at the beginning and wind it around the right-hand reel. Your copy will be missing the first few seconds; so it’s good if your tape has some silence at the beginning, so that your copy will have all of the important stuff. Likewise, the ribosome can’t copy the entire chromosome, since it doesn’t start copying until it’s latched onto it, so the telomere on the copy will be a little shorter than on the original chromosome. But since there’s nothing important encoded in the telomere (it’s just a repeating sequence), that doesn’t matter.

Except that if the cell goes through too many divisions, the telomeres get shorter and shorter, and bad things can start happening. If the telomere is completely gone, the ribosome will have to latch onto something else, and the copy of the chromosome might be missing an important bit. More generally, short telomeres are associated with cell aging, and various cancers.

Here’s a
paper
by some Geron scientists; it may not be exactly what Cordova is talking about, but it seems close enough. It talks about telomere capping: restoring telomeres when they get worn down.

Unfortunately for Cordova, none of this follows from ID or from Dembski’s idea of steganographically encoded information in the genome. To reuse the car/manual analogy, researchers noticed that the more worn the tires are, the more often blowouts happen. They didn’t find “change the tires every 100,000 miles” in the manual.

Cordova also writes:

It was also very satisfying to see one or our IDEA members who is a protein engineer apply the concepts of comparing sequences across species to assist her in elucidating the structure of proteins she was researching. Indeed, were it not for how proteins were architected across various species, the elucidation would have been exponentially more difficult. Thankfully those “conserved” regions led her quickly to where the treasures would be found.

The problem here is that there’s nothing in ID to suggest that proteins should be similar from one species to the next. In fact, one would think that when different species have a common problem (such as carrying oxygen through the bloodstream, or copying DNA or RNA, or building a cell wall), that an intelligent designer would have used similar solutions to solve them. Code reuse, and all that. Furthermore, a designer who came up with the whole shebang wouldn’t be limited by the lineage of various species, and could’ve used the same solution in unrelated or distantly-related species, such as dolphins and sharks, or grasses and fungi. Since the ID crowd have steadfastly refused to make any concrete predictions, they can’t say that any of this follows from ID.

But evolution and common descent do predict that there should be differences across species. And since we see such differences — and since they fall into a nested hierarchy — this has to be counted as a win in the evolution column.

In other words, if Dembski and pals want to say that ID has applications in biotech, they’re going to have to try harder. Here’s your consolation prize. Let us know when you’ve got something.