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New study: loss of non-coding DNA causes abnormal heart function

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Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

First, let’s see what Darwinian evolutionists predict about junk DNA, before we look at what the experiments show.

Here’s biologist John Timmer to explain the orthodox Darwinian view of DNA from 2007:

Personally, I fall into the “it’s all junk” end of the spectrum. If almost all of these sequences are not conserved by evolution, and we haven’t found a function for any of them yet, it’s hard to see how the “none of it’s junk” view can be maintained. There’s also an absence of support for the intervening view, again because of a lack of evidence for actual utility. The genomes of closely related species have revealed very few genes added from non-coding DNA, and all of the structural RNA we’ve found has very specific sequence requirements. The all-junk view, in contrast, is consistent with current data.

Got that? According to Darwinists, DNA is almost entirely junk – this is what is consistent with the view that creatures have evolved through a process of random mutation and selection. The estimates that I’ve seen from evolutionary biologists range from 95% to 99% junk. Now let’s compare the religion with science, and separate mythology from reality.

Here is an article from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory discussing a new peer-reviewed science paper published in the Nature Communications journal. (H/T William)

Excerpt:

Researchers have shown that when parts of a genome known as enhancers are missing, the heart works abnormally, a finding that bolsters the importance of DNA segments once considered “junk” because they do not code for specific proteins.

The team, led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), examined the role of two heart enhancers in the mouse genome, showing that the loss of either one resulted in symptoms that resemble human cardiomyopathy, a disease in which the heart muscle often becomes enlarged or rigid. In humans, the disease often leads to heart failure.

The findings appear in a study published today in the journal Nature Communications.

And there is actually a helpful summary of how evidence has emerged over the past few years that falsified the Darwinian prediction of “it’s all junk”:

When scientists sequenced the human genome, they discovered that less than 5 percent of our DNA were genes that actually coded for protein sequences. The biological functions of the noncoding portions of the genome were unclear.

Over the past fifteen years, however, there has been a growing appreciation for the importance of these noncoding regions, thanks in large part to the efforts of individual labs and, more recently, large international efforts such as the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project.

What became clear from this work is that there are many elements of the genome, including enhancers, that are involved in regulating gene expression, even though they do not encode for proteins directly.

This realization meant that there were vast sections of the genome that needed to be explored and understood. Dickel noted that there are about 20,000 genes in the mouse genome, and in many cases, scientists have a fairly good understanding of what will happen if any one of them is disabled. In contrast, there are 80,000 candidate heart enhancers in the human genome, and it is still unclear how important they are for human development.

“In genetic studies, the way you establish whether a gene is important is you delete it from the genome and see what happens,” said Dickel. “In many cases, there are genes that, if disabled, make it difficult for the organism to survive. For enhancers, it’s less known what the consequences are if they are damaged or missing. To use a car analogy, if we took the battery out of a car, it wouldn’t start. That’s a critical component. A missing or damaged enhancer could be essential like a battery, or more similar to a missing passenger seat in the car. It’s not as nice, but it’s still possible to drive the car.”

Note this new study is just one small example of function in the non-coding region of DNA.

Consider this quotation from John Mattick:

[The vast majority of the mammalian genome is differentially transcribed in precise cell-specific patterns to produce large numbers of intergenic, interlacing, antisense and intronic non-protein-coding RNAs, which show dynamic regulation in embryonal development, tissue differentiation and disease, with even regions superficially described as ‘gene deserts’ expressing specific transcripts in particular cells… Moreover, where tested, these noncoding RNAs usually show evidence of biological function in different developmental and disease contexts, with, by our estimate, hundreds of validated cases already published and many more en route, which is a big enough subset to draw broader conclusions about the likely functionality of the rest.

(Source)

Dr. John Mattick is the executive director of the Garvan Institute, and lab head at the RNA Biology and Plasticity lab.

When I talk to rank and file atheists, they like to tell me that their atheism is backed by the findings of science. I say, which findings? The origin of the universe? The cosmic fine-tuning? The origin of life? The Cambrian explosion? Molecular machines? Irreducible complexity? Galactic habitability? Stellar habitability? What science backs up your atheism?

So far, the most scientific answer I’ve gotten was the junk DNA. The most common answer is Star Trek and Star Wars.

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Was withdrawing American troops from Iraq a good thing for world peace?

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Control of Iraq (click for larger image)
Control of Iraq (click for larger image)

I really enjoyed this article from David French in National Review.

It says:

In Tuesday night’s debate, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine defended the indefensible — a strategic retreat from Iraq that threw away the fruits of American military victory, helped enable a terrifying genocide, and empowered America’s enemies. Even worse, he did so while spouting a pack of deceptions and half-truths that exhibited a child’s understanding of American strategic interests.

Where to begin? First, it was stunning that Kaine brought up as an accomplishment America’s dramatically reduced overseas deployments — as if the only measure of strategic success is the number of Americans in harm’s way. He said it was a “very, very good thing” that instead of 175,000 deployed, we now have only 15,000.

Well, yes, if America’s enemies were defeated or contained. Instead, American retreat created power vacuums that our enemies filled. Jihadists control more territory, have more men under arms, and are more effectively attacking America and American allies than when Hillary Clinton became secretary of state. Those are facts that make American withdrawal look less like an accomplishment and more like an inexcusable retreat.

Moreover, we didn’t have to maintain 175,000 troops in the field to hold on to our hard-fought gains. Kaine made the choice binary — maximum or minimum. Yet our defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq (the precursor to ISIS) was so comprehensive that the presence of only a small number of American combat troops could have prevented the kind of blitzkrieg we saw in 2014, when ISIS overran large parts of Iraq and Syria. There was never a question of keeping massive numbers of troops in the field. The question was whether we’d keep any troops in Iraq, and the Obama administration said no.

And that brings me to Kaine’s central deception. He still clings to the old, discredited line that America had no choice but to pull troops out of Iraq because the Bush-era “status of forces” agreement mandated their removal. Yet comprehensive reporting in the New York Times and The New Yorker magazine tells a very different story — of an administration that was unwilling to commit the roughly 10,000 to 16,000 (not 175,000) troops needed to maintain stability and of an Iraqi government that was unwilling to risk political capital at home for the sake of a merely nominal American presence. In other words, both sides blundered, badly.

As any number of strategic thinkers have noted, the results weren’t just predictable, they were predicted — by President George W. Bush himself. Speaking in 2007, Bush said that if troops were withdrawn before commanders said Iraq was ready, then:

  • It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al-Qaeda.
  • It would mean that we’d be risking mass killings on a horrific scale.
  • It would mean we allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan.
  • It would mean we’d be increasing the probability that American troops would have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous.

All of these things happened. All of them. ISIS has committed genocide. It blitzed through Iraq, threatening Baghdad and even Kurdistan, and it has created a nation-sized jihadist terror state, one that is shrinking only because — yes — American troops have returned.

David French was deployed to Iraq, and saw Americans killed there. Then Obama pulled out our forces, giving the enemies of America a great victory. A bit later, the Islamic State (ISIL) formed, and began to take control, committing atrocities unthinkable to most of the naive people who voted for Obama. Retreat from Iraq created a mess, and we should learn from that failure. You can’t just pull Western troops out and expect everything to magically fix itself.

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Muslim man proud of son for murdering his daughter after she married a Christian

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Leftist Pew Research: Should converts away from Islam be killed?
Leftist Pew Research: Should converts away from Islam be killed?

A friend sent me this article and it just made me so unhappy.

The article appeared in the Calgary Sun:

For two months, over the thunder of machines at the steel mill, the men taunted Mubeen Rajhu about his sister. Even now, they laugh at how easy it was to make him lose his temper.

Some people had seen Tasleem in their Lahore slum with a Christian man. She was 18, a good Muslim girl, out in public with a man. Even though the man had converted to Islam out of love for her, this couldn’t be allowed.

“Some guys got to know that his sister was having a relationship,” says Ali Raza, a co-worker at the mill. “They would say: ’Can’t you do anything? What is the matter with you? You are not a man.”’

Raza can barely contain a smile as he talks about the hours spent needling Rajhu.

“He used to tell us, ’If you don’t stop, I will kill myself. Stop!”’ Raza says.

He raises his voice to compete with the sounds of the coal-powered mill, and workers blackened by its dust gather to listen. They too smile. A few laugh at the memory of Rajhu’s outbursts.

“The guys here told him, ’It would be better to kill your sister. It is better than letting her have this relationship,”’ Raza says.

Rajhu told them he had bought a pistol, and one day in August he stopped coming to work.

Rajhu discovered that his sister had defied the family and married the Christian. For six days he paced. His rage grew. How could she?

He watched her laughing on the phone, ignoring their mother’s pleas to leave the man.

On the seventh day, he retrieved the pistol from where he had hidden it and walked up to his sister and with one bullet to the head, he killed her.

Killed her? He murdered a defenseless woman. This is the exact opposite of what a brother should do for a sister. Instead, he should use force to protect her from evil – not bring the evil himself.

But what was interesting was how everyone accepted it:

In the vast majority of cases, the “honour” killer is a man and the victim is a woman.

She is a sister who falls in love with a man not of her family’s choosing. She is a daughter who refuses to agree to an arranged marriage, sometimes to a man old enough to be her father. She is a wife who can no longer stay in an abusive marriage and divorces her husband.

He is a brother, like Rajhu, who cannot bear the taunts of other men brought up as he was, believing that women are subservient and must be kept in the shadows, their worth often measured by the number of sons they can produce. He is a neighbour, like Raza at the plant, who doesn’t think his friend did anything wrong in taking his sister’s life. He is a father, like Tasleem’s, who is angry about her killing not because she is dead, but because her death will reveal her “shame” to other members of the family and beyond.

The father says some terrible things about the daughter, and is completely oblivious to looking at things from her perspective.

In some places, it really is very difficult to be a Christian:

The man Tasleem married, Jehangir, fled the night she was killed. The gate to his home, barely a block from Tasleem’s, is padlocked. But the fallout from his love for Tasleem has engulfed the members of the small Christian community living in the area.

Earlier this month, just weeks after the killing, gunmen fired shots into their homes. No one was hurt, but no one has slept well since. In this majority Muslim country, Christians make up barely 5% of the population and in recent years have come under increasing attack by militants, who insist all non-Muslims are unbelievers. Yet Pakistan’s minorities, including Christians, are protected in the country’s constitution.

“We have been scared since the killing took place,” says a neighbour, Shahzia Masih, sitting in a small room decorated with pictures of Jesus and Mary. “There are just a few houses of Christians here, but we have nowhere else to go.”

I suppose that since I am tough on women choosing good men, someone might ask me what I would do if my sister married an atheist. Answer: I have a longstanding policy of always putting my relationships with Christians above family members who aren’t interested in Christianity. I naturally prefer to do things with people who don’t shush me when I want to be myself and speak about the beliefs that matter to me. I’m fine with people who let me be myself, family or non-family. I certainly don’t expect everyone to agree with me. All I ask is that if they want a relationship with me, that they not stifle me. I have atheists cousins that I play online games with, but they don’t shush me about my beliefs and moral views at all. My atheist aunt and uncle know that they can get me to do things if they let me talk about the things I care about. But they don’t have to agree with me, of course. Because they don’t believe what I believe. I like to say what I think, but I don’t want anyone to be scared into agreeing with me. I’m different from Islam and the secular left in that respect. You believe what you want, but let me believe what I want if you want me to be your friend. Surprising how many Muslims and progressives won’t take that deal.

I am pretty confident in Christianity as a worldview in the sense that I believe that if people put reason and evidence first, then they will arrive at Christianity. It doesn’t make any sense to try to coerce people into it… Jesus is the Son of God, and he had all the power in the world to coerce. He wasn’t willing to do it, not even to save his own life when he took on the form of a man in order to meet with his creatures and rescue them. That means something to me. You just have to read Philippians 2 to see that this unwillingness to use power, but to instead serve others, is at the core of Christian teaching.