ID advocates look forward to discovery of natural genetic engineering

By Joe Felsenstein
Image of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge

I try to keep up with the Discovery Institute’s site Evolution News and Science Today’. It used to be called ‘Evolution News and Views’ but they presumably wanted to emphasize that all that was published there is hard factual information, so they changed the name. I am getting a bit behind: on the 24th of September there was a remarkable article written by Brian Miller, the Research Coordinator of the DI’s Center for Science and Culture.

Under the title “Nearly All of Evolution Is Best Explained by Engineering” his post notes a report that, as it describes “Transposable elements modify gene regulation in maize to confer drought tolerance, alter flowering time, and enable plants to grow in toxic aluminum soils.” He also mentions a number of other cases in which organisms adapt rapidly in ways which seem to him to be the result of their being engineered to do so. His report is one in a series on a Conference on Engineering in Living Systems (CELS) given in June and sponsored by the Engineering Research Group (ERG) of the Center for Science & Culture of the Discovery Institute. Proceedings of the CELS conference seem not to be available online at this point.

To Miller, this seems to be evidence of the correctness of James Shapiro’s hypothesis of Natural Genetic Engineering (NGE). Shapiro’s view and many references to his summaries of it can be found in the Wikipedia article on NGE. He thinks that organisms adapt by containing mechanisms that propose, not random genetic variation, but the genetic variation that is specifically needed in the current situation.

Among advocates of ID, this has been greeted with enthusiasm. At Uncommon Descent, their in-house science reporter “News” (Denyse O’Leary) made a similar comment about a report that reptile teeth were gained multiple times in evolution, on 10/16/21 she noted that

In short, when researchers actually looked at reptile tooth history, it was hardly a simple evolution tale at all. It seems as if there are plans that life forms can access, perhaps within their genomes. But how do they trigger the needed changes, as opposed to just going extinct?

The idea of natural genetic engineering that responds adaptively by making the needed changes in the genome, rather than by having natural selection pick them out from among available variation, is wildly popular among ID advocates.

But there are a few questions that need to be raised …

  • Does NGE mean that when an organism is stressed by an environmental change, or by lack of resources, it has a higher rate of mutation, including genomic changes such as chromosome rearrangements? There are numerous reports of this. Is this an adaptation, or simply the mechanisms of replication functioning less exactly when the organism is stressed?
  • Are the mutants (including genomic changes) preferentially in an adaptive direction? Or are they, as usually happens, mostly neutral or deleterious?
    Note that Brian Miller describes NGE by saying that

    NGE refers to genetic alterations that are not random. Instead, they result from cells employing highly complex machinery to direct targeted DNA modifications.

  • Where is natural selection in all of this? If a mutation arises which is adaptive, is its increase in frequency in the population due to its fitness advantage? Or does NGE somehow continually push it up in frequency?
  • Where in the genome is this mechanism? And how does it know what the organism needs?
  • How is it maintained intact in the face of mutation? If the genetic variations it induces spread, do they only continue to be present in individuals whose NGE system is intact? If so that would be a mechanism maintaining NGE. But recombination should rapidly break down any such association.
  • There also seems to be an interesting contradiction between the NGE view and current advocacy by young earth creationists. The YECs are strongly pushing the idea that there are basically no advantageous mutations. NGE seems to say that its marvellous mechanisms guarantee mostly superbly beneficial mutations. Can these two views be reconciled?

Brian Miller, in EN&ST, actually goes so far as to declare that

Traditional evolutionary processes do play a part in biological adaptation, but mounting evidence demonstrates that their role is relatively minor in the drama of life …. Instead, engineered adaptive mechanisms that direct targeted modifications perform on center stage.

We await the answers to these questions.