The Language of God by Francis Collins

All in all an interesting book to read. His primary argument is that Darwinian evolution is an unassailable fact and not inconsistent with a belief in a personal and awesomely intelligent creator God. Collins is a theistic evolutionist, but doesn’t like the title because biologists don’t know what theistic means but are suspicious of the term before hearing an argument and Christians are suspicious of the evolution part. Neither can with an open mind carry on the discussion. He would like the theistic evolutionist be call by the term ‘BioLogos’; a term that might be acceptable to both theologian and scientist.

His arguments when directly related to his work with DNA and the human genome are convincing while not reaching the level of being compelling. This is natural since he was the leader of the team that successfully completed the Human Genome Project; therefore it is to be expected that his strongest argument is tied to the human genome project.

The argument is similar to a tool of textual criticism that literary critics use to identify the copying hierarchy whereby they identify which copies of a text are older and how each are related to other copies. For instance if I sent this document out and someone retyped it and in the process misspelled interesting as “intresting” and sent it to someone else who then copied the error accurately and sent it to twelve people and added a new error changing ‘book’ to ‘bok’. Those twelve copies were then accurately replicated the copies and sent them on. Three hundred years later someone collected all available copies and compared them. The errors would be noted and it could be argued that all the copies with both ‘intresting’ and ‘bok’ were copies of the ones with only the error ‘intresting’ and the one without either error is a predecessor of the ones with errors. If there are only one or two errors, the confidence level would be low, but if multiple copy errors are found in each document and placed in the hierarchy; the confidence level concerning which were parent and which were child documents can become an almost certainty.

Dr. Collins uses gene ‘errors’ and ‘junk DNA’ to trace similar or the same errors or junk DNA throughout the human genome and beyond to the genomes of multiple species. Geneticists have identified genes with flaws so great that they cannot function. They have also concluded that approximately 80% of the genome serves no useful function at this time and have been copied from some ancestor who either had a use for the surplus genes or they were in themselves errors that didn’t hurt the organism and so allowed by evolution to survive the war of the fittest. His argument is that if the same ‘error’ or ‘junk DNA’ is found in multiple species you can conclude with a high level of confidence that the two species have a common ancestor.

To some extent his argument is a negative argument tied to what is not known, an ‘evolution of the gaps’ theory but never-the-less is interesting and convincing.

….to be continued.