Not so well designed

My blog this time is a salute to and an unofficial review of a book I’ve just read: The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not by Dr. Abby Hafer who teaches human anatomy and physiology at Curry College in Massachusetts.

Genesis Chapter 1, verse 27 says: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him.”  Despite any religious doubts, as one gets older and some body parts don’t work as well as they used to, one starts to wonder. Dr. Hafer’s book educated me in much more detail about various parts of our bodies that quite simply aren’t very well designed. And what I like is that she does it with quite a bit of humor, as well as giving some well-deserved digs at the so-called Design Institute in Washington state that is pushing hard for religious creationism to be taught in public schools based on their claims of the evidence for our ‘perfect design’.  

Many men are aware of the danger of getting hit in the balls while playing some robust sport such as football or baseball. We’re told that they can only produce sperm if they are cooler than the rest of our body. But many other mammals have them safely inside their bodies, e.g. elephants; and all male birds, who have a higher body temperature than us mammals, have them inside too, and they work fine. Poor design on our part.

I have difficulty swallowing large pills. Hundreds of people choke to death every year in America. Our windpipe leading to our lungs, and our esophagus leading to our stomach share a common area in humans at the back of our mouth/throat area. Not so with some other animals. This tricky set-up is the price evolution made us pay for our variable voice sounds. OK, I’ll enjoy the opera and be careful taking my daily prescription pills; but don’t tell me I’m designed perfectly in the image of God.

Even more serious is the difficulty and pain that women go through giving birth to babies which led to countless tragedies in earlier times. OK, so it’s the price we humans have to pay for our big brainy heads – I can understand that, but don’t talk to me about ‘good design’. 

Most of us have heard the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’. It was not coined by Darwin and has misleading connotations which led to the unfortunate term ‘Social Darwinism’ and the self-centered arrogance of a Donald Trump. It would be more accurate to say ‘survival of the fitter’ to describe evolution, because what evolutionary nature cares about is whether you’re put together sufficiently well enough to live long enough to breed, while meanwhile winning out in the competition for the best mate by being smarter and looking more beautiful.

While on the Brits, we are sometimes referred to in America as Limeys. This is a compliment as it has its roots in the fact that the British navy, as it explored the world and built the Empire in bygone days, discovered that if the sailors sucked on limes from time to time they wouldn’t get scurvy – a serious and often fatal disease in earlier times brought on by a lack of vitamin C. What I didn’t know till I read Dr. Hafer’s book is that many other animals, including cats, make their own vitamin C. And we have almost the entire biochemical pathway for making it too but, because of some mutation many moons ago, we lack just the last darned step in the process. Now no loving designer god would go to all the trouble of giving us this biochemical process and then, just at the last moment, say to himself: “I’ll make life a bit more challenging for him and leave out this last step”!   

Eyesight is a fabulous thing and I’m so grateful that I can see the beauty of my family and the beauty of nature and art, not to mention reading etc., etc. But, for all this our eyes are strangely put together. At the back of the eye are special cells called photoreceptors that when light falls on them send electrical pulses along nerve fibers to the brain, and we see. But, did you know that the photoreceptor cells – called rods and cones because of their shape – are in upside down, so that the optic nerves come out on top of the retina, run along on top filtering out some of the light, and then go down a hole on the middle of the retina in order to get back to the brain thus creating a literal blind-spot in all our eyes. If you believe in a creator god then he/she must prefer squids and octopi as in their eyes the photoreceptor cells are in the right way round.  

I don’t want any reader of this blog to go away thinking I’m just complaining. No! I’m very grateful for my body that has allowed me to do all that I have in a healthy long life. But don’t talk to me about perfect design. The wonderful truth is that all living things on this planet of ours – millions of species of animals, plants, fungi, amoebas and bacteria of all kinds – we’re all of us descended from a common ancient ancestral bacterial-like cell, and wouldn’t have evolved into all us wonderful creatures on this planet but for little mistakes in the copying process of our ancestors’ DNA that natural selection has worked upon over billions of years. This is the most wonderful and fabulous story in the world, and I love the fact that it has all played out, and you and I are here, simply because of imperfections.

Thanks Dr. Hafer.

CRISPR and crispier

CRISPR or ‘Clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats’ is a genetic engineering feat that has been borrowed/learned from bacteria that have been using the technique to defend themselves against viral infections for hundreds of millions of years. Yep, even E. coli can catch a cold and don’t like it. Viruses that attack bacteria are called bacteriophage or simply phages

Anyway, CRISPR is one method to alter or edit a strand of DNA. The majority of the thousands of bacterial species in existence have developed this defense mechanism. Clever eh? An aside here: the fact that ALL living creatures on this planet – viruses and bacteria included, along with plants and us animals, all use the same code system for their genetic material - is huge evidence that we are all from a single point of creation close to 4 billion years ago, and are therefore all related to one other.

Now it has been suggested that the CRISPR technique of genetic engineering be used to cripple the DNA of Aedes aegypti  the species of mosquito that carries the Zika virus, plus the dengue and chikungunya viruses, thus wiping out this species of mosquito which threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the coming years, spreading up into the United States further and further north as climate change continues to bring warmer and wetter weather.

BUT, already the alarm bells are being sounded – ooh we mustn’t harm this cute little mosquito. OK not quite in those terms. But let’s get things in perspective. We’re happy to kill viruses and bacteria and wish we could totally eradicate those that cause TB and the plague etc. But then there are other bacteria such as E. coli that we depend on for our digestion, and can’t live without. Another aside: I get irritated when the evening news talks of an outbreak of E. coli – heh, I have a billion inside of me – I hope. What they mean is a rogue strain of E. coli with some altered DNA; but let’s not get sidetracked.

OK you say, it’s fine to kill viruses and bacteria but a mosquito is an animal. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) over three thousand species of animals are in the process of being obliterated, mainly through human action, and few people care a ---- . Among these are the Siberian tiger, the Brown spider monkey (a fairly close relative of mine) and the blue-throated Macaw – a beautiful bird; all more closely related to me than a mosquito. OK: yes, we should ascertain the biological linkages of the Aedes mosquito: is it an important food source for some other creature? does it play a part in some pollination? Etc. etc. But what should not be dismissed, before any research has been done, is to even look at this possible avenue of removing this serious threat to human life.

I live in the Boston area and our regional newspaper The Boston Globe really has had its knickers in a twist over gene-editing in recent days with several articles critical of the process. Apparently the idea behind it comes from the billionaire owner of the newspaper. The article today is classic - reporting on a phone survey. It begins: “Most Americans oppose using powerful new technology (note the phraseology) to alter the genes of unborn babies, even to prevent serious inherited diseases, according to a new poll.” I’m not at all surprised. The USA is the only western nation where the majority of the population is so poorly educated, at least in the life sciences, that they don’t even accept the truth of evolution – a fact that has been known for many decades and is accepted in the rest of the developed world.  Americans hear the term DNA used in crime dramas on TV all the time but the vast majority won’t know what the letters stand for let alone how DNA operates in our bodies. So if asked over the phone if they want DNA manipulated in a lab, and using creepy CRISPR too, of course they’re going to flip and say NO.

I’m a proud member of the National Committee for Science Education NCSE. We are working to try and ensure that public school students are taught the wonderful truths of the life sciences, which in too many states they are not.  23% of biology teachers in public schools refuse to teach evolution. Without that basic concept one cannot understand how this wonderful and complex world of nature works and interacts. We should support the important research being done to understand gene editing, CRISPR included, and how we can use this knowledge to save human lives.