DNA is Served
We have found the secret of life!
Francis Crick
Nobel prize 1962 for discovery of the structure of DNA
I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken
Oliver Cromwell
You may be wondering why DNA has not yet made an appearance in this story. After all, isn’t it ‘the secret of life’, as many have called it? Well no, I’m afraid not. DNA is just a chemical, and chemicals are not alive, by definition. Nobody disputes this. Put a strand of DNA on a plate, and it just stays there until it dries up and blows away. Put piles of DNA on a billion plates for a billion years and it still just lies there. It’s just a chemical. No more.
By the 1950s the role of DNA was already quite well known, but (after poaching Rosalind Franklin’s work) Crick and Watson provided the twisted-ladder structure which made sense of DNA’s Mechanism. Since this discovery, enormous effort has been poured into DNA research but, as with the Primordial Soup experiments, simple-mechanical expectations have been dashed. Surely we were going to find a gene for intelligence and a gene for criminality and so forth? No. No such things exist. And the more people investigate, the more complex the genetic picture becomes. Genes in isolation might explain your hair colour, but even something as apparently simple as the shape of your nose requires the involvement of multiple genes.
§ A gene is a specific fraction of a chromosome, all made ultimately from the chemical DNA.
So what do genes do, precisely? Speaking broadly, genes provide a template from which specific new chemicals (‘proteins’) can be synthesised to construct or repair the cells of the physical body.
§ A human body needs up to two million different proteins. Each is made up of hundreds or thousands of sub-units (amino acids) and is of a particular complexity and shape, and each is dedicated to a particular purpose or purposes.
A gene is the first link in a chain which leads to the fabrication of a specific chemical (protein) which is then slotted into its correct position in an already existing, or growing pattern. And as a gene is a length of DNA it also is just a chemical.
The problem is how, in principle, might a non-intelligent chemical contain within itself a psychological aptitude, like criminality or intelligence?
§ Materialism has a very hard time here: it’s the ‘Something from Nothing’ problem again (as per claiming that very abstract Consciousness self-generated from very material chemicals).
DNA clearly plays a key role in the physical repair and reconstruction of our bodies and in the inheritance of physical attributes as the embryo develops. Thus it was called the ‘secret of life’, because, to a Materialist, the Matter in our bodies generates all that we are, including Mind and Consciousness. Thus DNA, being a clearly important chemical, was thought worthy of the title. It’s still just a lifeless chemical.
Who originally called DNA ‘the secret of life’? Francis Crick I think. This dramatic phrase was pounced on by the press and thus became ‘Truth’ for many. Other scientists did not rush to correct the false impression that Science had unlocked the Secret of Life: that Man had at last triumphed over Nature (and ‘God’, of course). Crick called his book Life Itself, for example. I’ve heard several Scientists on television quite seriously claim that our ideas are caused by our brain activity, meaning that the chemical reactions or electric currents in our brains are actually generating thoughts from within their own electro-chemical being (it must be from within their own being as there can be no outside agency for a Materialist).Thus, they claim that the pulse that causes a trace on an EEG screen is not ‘associated with a thought’, or ‘a result of a thought’, but the originator of the thought; or is the self-generating thought itself.
§ To consider that an electrical pulse ‘is a thought’ is like thinking that a television signal, ‘is a picture’, which it is not. A tv signal is a transmission of a deconstructed picture, intelligently encoded, for a purpose, which is intelligently decoded at its point of destination, again, for a purpose. Intelligence.. purpose.. we can’t get away from it. A Materialist cannot admit of an intelligent purpose as an outside agency; hence brain chemicals and electricity must for him be the exclusive formative agents of thoughts, absurd paradoxes notwithstanding.
According to the Materialist, electricity either is, or produces from within itself, (which amounts to the same thing) not just one thought, but all the original thoughts that everyone has ever had in the history of the world. This presumably must mean that all electricity contains all original thoughts, as it’s hard to see how just the right bit of it popped up into my mind rather than yours, and on this particular Friday rather than ten years ago, specifically to create my own special thoughts (and memories, feelings, interests, and ideas, of course) just for me. And presumably there must be many different sorts of electricity to account for all my varied emotions, and my will, and sense of purpose, and imagination, and for all my other human faculties. And I guess the electricity must be of all sorts of strengths or qualities to account for all the Plutos and relatively few Platos.
§ A Mind Experiment: How might we define ‘I’ if electricity is providing our thoughts for us?
By logic, this can only mean that as it can think, all electricity must be alive, and being thoughtful, can thus create cathedrals and so forth, unless brain electricity is of a special creative sort, different in kind from the stuff that makes the fridge gurgle, and I’ve never heard anyone suggest this. Once we ditch Materialism we can also ditch such bizarre ideas as electricity or chemicals creating thoughts.
§ What would a ‘thoughtful-electricity’ Materialist make of Dr Eleanor McGuire’s 2000 study of London cab-drivers, in which she showed that the area of the brain associated with mapping and navigation (the hippocampus) increased in size as the drivers learned more of ‘the knowledge’ of London’s streets and routes? Idealism says that Man’s intentions, thoughts, and actions caused the hippocampus to adapt to its owner’s requirements. Materialism must claim that the hippocampus grew first (for no reason) and the electricity in it then created thoughts and memories of the mental maps for the drivers without any input on his part. Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall.. buzzing quietly.
Everyone assumed in the early days of DNA research that the more advanced the life-form, the more complex would be its genome.
§ Genome: the name for the entire length of DNA specific to a particular organism. Almost all of your body’s estimated forty trillion cells (2019) contains a copy of your own unique DNA-strand, each one made up of some three billion chemical units.
Each strand is about two metres long, but is coiled and supercoiled to fit within the cell nucleus, which is about 1/100th of a millimetre across, or similar. This represents a data storage rate at least 100,000,000,000 times denser than the best current computer storage systems. Pretty neat for an allegedly random occurrence.
If all the 125 billion miles of DNA strands in your body were to be uncoiled and laid end to end, they would wrap around the earth 5 million times, and each single strand contains more information than all twenty-eight volumes of my Encyclopaedia Britannica. So I’m led to believe. (All numbers approximate… and probably will be reconsidered at some point.)
But it turned out not to be so. For example, the humble guinea pig has a larger genome than humans; and Trichomonas vaginalis, a parasitic protozoan which causes something called Trichomoniasis in women, which I don’t wish to find out anything more about, has an estimated 59,681 genes, as opposed to the human count of 20,000-25,000. Why might a tiny pathogen have three times as many genes than the host it infests?
And how do a mere 25,000 human gene-units lay out the plan for an embryo and its entire placental support system intricately linked to the mother host, then construct all the scores of trillions of cells, all of the right type and in the right order, making muscle and bone and lungs and heart, etc, and then supervise and create the wiring up of the hundred thousand million neurons in the brain (approx 100,000 per cubic millimetre), between which there are an estimated hundred trillion connections, which dictate or allow a person’s enormous range of mental capacities, never mind the forty miles of nerve strings and 60,000 miles of blood vessels, and inter-locking and harmonised endocrine and metabolic systems and so on and so forth…. all at once?
A computer programmer would plot out an algorithm in minute detail to methodically specify and sequence all the processes that were needed… but he would be stumped by even a routine biological process. How, for example, would he devise a schema for an automated system which creates 25 trillion red blood cells (each containing scores of billions of precisely placed atoms) at the rate of 2 million per second? (He would also need to add to his program a parallel procedure for disassembling and disposing of 2 million worn out red blood cells per second, thus keeping the system in balance.) Twenty-five thousand ‘clickable’ units is clearly nothing like enough to set up and run even such a routine system, never mind building a highly complex entity like a liver from scratch, or the astonishing procedure for making an entire new body in parallel with a custom-built womb.
What’s more, it seems that some 95-98% of human DNA does not code for a building protein. This 98% was originally (and rather arrogantly, I suggest) called ‘junk DNA’. Now it is being found that it does have a purpose after all, being involved somehow in switching genes on and off. (More on this later.) No doubt more purposes will be admitted in due course. Why Us? by Dr James Le Fanu is a fascinating exploration of what genes do, don’t do, and can’t do.
Any book on embryology will tell of the incredible number of precisely organised processes that go into making a new being, all with no effort on the part of the mother. What is in charge of this galactic-scale of organisation? Or is it all a sheer accident as a Materialist claims, given that we know that accidents in any other complex realm produce entropic collapse and not gigantic levels of creative order?
§ Please note: all the billions and trillions reported here are estimates, and they can vary widely, by multiple billions and trillions.
There was clearly much more to genes than the mechanical one-to-one equivalence that the researchers had expected.
It also soon became apparent that all creatures share the DNA principle and also share huge chunks of the DNA code. For example, according to one interpretation, you and I seem to share some 50% of our Homo sapiens genetic code with a banana; and, good news for Welshmen, about 35% with a daffodil.
§ The humble fruit fly needs 13,601 genes: just half as many as a human, and, incredibly, it shares two thirds of these genes with us. And more of its genes are for coding proteins than we use ourselves. A wheat plant has five times as many genes as the King of England. What is certain is that a mechanistic approach of ‘one gene does one thing’ is dead in the water.
It seems that the extra 50% human-only genes that a banana is not privy to, are the genes which are responsible for all the attributes which we do not share with a banana. I can think of quite a lot. Do these extra 50% contain all our potential for Mind and Consciousness, as well as all the other more obvious differences, like body-shape and pigmentation? It is currently assumed so, although nobody has found such genes.
But if not… then maybe, if no absolute line can be drawn, we should have to admit the possibility that bananas and daffs have some sort of Intelligence… and maybe Consciousness? A bizarre suggestion, but an experimenter with a polygraph lie detector claims that tomatoes can feel something akin to pain.** It’s unknown how (or indeed whether) chemical genes relate to the thoughts, emotions, aspirations, and all the other 1001 non-physical qualities that people experience, and which make people people, rather than corpses or random ‘assemblages’ of abiotic chemicals. Clearly genes are involved in bodily processes and heredity, and in some non-physical processes. But how can a chemical possibly relate to a thought or an aptitude, even if Life, Mind and Consciousness are in control, rather than abiotic chemicals?**
There’s more.. we apparently share over 98% of our 25,000 genes with chimps. 2% of 25,000 = 500. Thus these 500 genes, looking at it mechanistically, must somehow account for all the differences twixt Plato and Pongo.
§ Although we are superficially close to a chimp, there are actually thousands of differences in body shape, each requiring thousands of modifications to cell, tissue, organs, etc; and more thousands of differences in the brain structure. How many gene-units might be needed to organise the ‘hardware’ in the brain associated with abstract thought; speech; creativity; memory; complex evaluative judgements; and so on and so on…? The number apparently available is about 500. What is going on? (..and en passant I offer, just for fun, the fact that an adenovirus, which can kill you stone dead, has only 40.)
And after all these puzzles, we must recognise that DNA can only operate within an already living cell. In other words, DNA is absolutely not Life Itself, but some sort of blueprint, used within an already living entity to repair the fabric of the moment, or to pass on physical characteristics to the next generation.
§ We normally think of men as having ‘xy‘ chromosomes and women as having ‘xx‘. However, there is at least one recorded case of a woman with xy chromosomes who has given birth to a girl, again with xy chromosomes. And we all carry some 70 ‘de novo’ genetic mutations that appeared in the sperm and egg that formed us, but which were not present in the contributing parents’ own genome.
Nothing is obvious or easily predictable in the world of genetics. For example, a lady called Lydia Fairchild was thought to be ‘not the mother of her three children according to their DNA’. It seems she has two sets of DNA. Why? Why don’t we all? Etc, etc…
Another example: it is an accepted fact that the DNA in our miniscule mitochondria power-houses (of which we have multiple gazillions**) is inherited exclusively from our mother. Guess what? There have been several cases noted in which paternal DNA has been found in mitochondria. Mystery upon mystery..
As genes are only chemicals, with no power of operation outside of a living cell, we may sensibly suggest that it is the cell that determines which coding genes are turned on and off, somehow using other (‘junk’) genes in the process and thus requiring an unknown number of levels of power and control. What are these powers? Where do they reside? What controls and coordinates them? A Materialist must insist that these powers and controls simply don’t exist, and that randomness does it all. An Idealist can accept what logic insists must exist, and may look more deeply.
§ ‘For their size, embryonic cells are the most complex structures in the universe’ according to Professor Lewis Wolpert. These cells become all our normal, average cells, via an enormous but unknown number of processes. There are perhaps 100,000 different proteins at work in an average cell, all involved in a gigantic number of immensely complicated procedures.** (Prof Wolpert also once wrote in the Sunday Times that ‘Open minds are empty minds.’ A concise comment on the attitude of dogmatised Big Science towards new thinking.)
Mutations happen from time to time, when cells divide. What causes these mutations? A Materialist is bound to say they are random, as for him there can be no possible ‘ghost in the machine’ to direct anything in the body; but for an Idealist, as LMC pre-existed the Universe, it must have created all the physical stuff within the Universe from within itself. Thus it must still be involved with its creations somehow. A horrifying idea to a Materialist, but logic insists.
§ Please go back to Chapter 5 if you are still having trouble with this.
Darwin never used the word ‘random’ in Origins. He required a cause for all things, beginning with ‘the Creator’. The process of Evolution by Natural Selection was not random, but caused by millions of rationally generated events, each individual death or birth feeding into the huge overall statistical pattern. Nowadays we would call this a ‘chaotic’ process. ‘Chaotic’ is not a helpful word to describe a non-chaotic but extremely complex process, but we seem to be stuck with it. It’s another Materialist lexical hi-jack, suggesting ‘purposelessness’, as per the Dogma.
It looked as though I had now answered my original question. Science isn’t interested in ghosts or NDE’s or poltergeists or premonitions and all the rest, because the unspoken Dogma of Materialism that Science has adopted will not in principle allow Anomalies to happen. And this ‘principle’ is always preferred to any challenging evidence. (Why? More later…)
Unfortunately, the Dogma has become so deeply accepted that for many scientists it is impossible to allow it to be challenged by a single white crow, never mind a huge flock of noisy anomalous starlings. If Materialist-Science were to admit one spook or anomaly the whole house of cards would come tumbling down. That is unthinkable, so the Materialist-Science establishment does what establishments have always done when faced with evidence that would challenge their certainties: they ignore it or laugh at it. When they can’t just ignore it or laugh at it they attack it, occasionally ferociously.
§ We are used to seeing tv programmes about a haunting automatically wheeling on a Scientist to debunk it with vague generalities and dogmatic assertions, rather than any sound proof or evidence, but delivered with great authority, which is almost as good. (However, I have recently detected a more independent attitude on the television, particularly in American programmes.)
Science was not meant to be like this. It was meant to be impartial, and was meant to collate ALL evidence to be carefully evaluated without prejudice. Evidence was not to be ignored because inconvenient; and especially not so if it was inconvenient merely to a dogma; and, worse, to an irrational dogma.
Science had been hi-jacked and distorted, and was now unfortunately operating according to the two-pronged maxim of:
1 Anomalies cannot happen, by dogmatic definition;
2 Anomalies therefore do not happen.
Whole libraries are devoted to anomalous evidence, but few scientists visit them, and always at risk to their reputations. Even Isaac Newton, often called ‘the greatest scientist who ever lived’, and Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of Evolution by Natural Selection, suffered professionally for their interest in the paranormal.
Some ‘sceptics’ say they don’t investigate anomalies because they are anecdotal and can not be reproduced (‘…the acid test for science’), but this is mistaken on two counts: some anomalies certainly are testable, and indeed have been tested; and as for anecdotes not being admissible, well, as one clear-minded scientist once put it: ‘One anecdote’s just an anecdote; but lots of anecdotes is evidence’.
All in the Mind
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven
Milton
Faith is the enemy of wisdom
Anon
My problem now was, would I be able to find anything even approaching ‘truth’, given the blockading mass of Dogma I had discovered?
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