Editor’s note: We are delighted to present this excerpt from Chapter 1 in the new book Epigenetics and the Architect: Evidence of Design at the Frontier of Biology, by Thomas E. Woodward and James P. Gills, MD (Discovery Institute Press).
Scientists continue to probe the incredible genome, even as they plumb the mysterious epigenome. These advances are worthwhile for their own sake — for the intrinsic value in deepening our understanding and appreciation of the intricacies of organic life. But this new double focus — genetics + epigenetics — also may teach us how to modify the epigenome through careful changes to diet, exercise, and other life patterns so as to improve our health and perhaps even the health of our descendants.
As we sketch a picture of this molecular architecture, we will highlight recent findings about DNA and show how the epigenome’s switches and gadgets work thanks to complex biological machinery. The machine descriptor in this context, mind you, must be taken with a grain of salt. The term is meant to convey the fact that each of these molecular devices is marked by a purposeful arrangement of precisely tailored parts into an organized whole, one that achieves a function that no mere jumble of parts would. But the machine imagery provides only a partial picture. It’s not that it exaggerates the situation. Just the opposite. It risks diminishing the advanced nature of these marvels, devices that possess an intrinsic and goal-directed purposiveness, often including the ability to self-assemble and self-repair. These twin powers are absent from the relatively crude technology devised by our most advanced human engineers.
The Language of Machines
We persist, however, in using the language of machines because we are all familiar with various manmade machines to one degree or another, and the language serves well to shatter the common misconception of microbial life as relatively crude and simple beside cutting-edge human technology. Take the most advanced human factory you can think of, and now imagine that it also can self-replicate, self-repair, and run without human factory workers; then you will begin to get an idea of the sort of “machines” we are talking about in microbiology.
As we explore this frontier of discovery, we will take a couple of trips via an imaginary micro-miniaturized submarine into the realm of the cell and visit its DNA-packed nucleus. The submarine is fictitious, of course, but what its crew observes are the very real discoveries made by advanced laboratories around the world.
Purposeless or Purposeful?
Because we are dealing with foundational scientific discoveries, we will address several “So what?” questions in the course of the book. One, already noted, relates to health and wellness. Another is whether these findings strengthen the impression of an inherent purpose to life and the natural world.
Moving deeper, we will consider how these findings challenge our worldview — our Weltanschauung, to use the German term. After exploring the new vistas of integrated, multilevel cellular complexity, we will ask, Who or what designed and built this system? Was it a purely blind, material process, as modern evolutionary theory holds? Or is there evidence that this sophisticated architecture sprang from some designing intelligence — from an Architect? This question will be tackled using an approach long employed in the historical sciences, called the method of multiple competing hypotheses, or inference to the best explanation, an approach elucidated with particular rigor by the late Cambridge philosopher of science Peter Lipton.
We approach with special care this issue of how cellular complexity arose, aware that modern evolutionary theory is closely associated in many people’s minds with cherished values such as scientific enlightenment, critical reasoning, and educational progress. As a result, when one points out empirical problems with its story of how life’s interconnected complexities arose, one reaction may be scandalized astonishment mixed with incredulity. This sense of shock is all the more likely if one has not followed the twists and turns in this scientific discussion in recent years. Those who have not will be unaware, for instance, that in November 2016, the Royal Society, the oldest and among the most distinguished scientific societies in the world, met in London to discuss questions in biology that remain unanswered by the neo-Darwinian synthesis. At the gathering, several leading life scientists revealed their deep dissatisfaction with textbook orthodoxy regarding how new life forms arose.
Needed: A New Theory?
Another notable moment occurred in 2022 with the publication of an article entitled, “Do We Need a New Theory of Evolution?” Appearing in a June issue of the UK’s left-leaning The Guardian, this controversial survey by science writer Stephen Buranyi featured the heretical ideas of various biologists from what is known as the Third Way of Evolution, or the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES). This group relegates the neo-Darwinian mechanism to a secondary role in explaining the emergence of novel biological form, focusing instead on new mechanisms they hope will shore up the weakened center post of evolutionary theory.
Meanwhile, various recent studies have expanded the empirical resources of those championing the design hypothesis.
As more questions arise about modern evolutionary theory, more scientists than ever, all around the world, are asking if textbook explanations still hold water. Is it plausible that mindless, undirected natural processes crafted all the cell’s high-tech hardware and software? Such a claim would seem, at the very least, to be under considerable stress from the weight of new data.
The Intricacies of the Cell
Charles Darwin himself had no way to glimpse the intricacies of the cell. He and his contemporaries viewed the cell as a fairly simple substance. But when one advances from Darwin’s Victorian England to the twenty-first century, we find a significant change in perspective. In recent years, as biologists and geneticists have continued to unravel the cell’s mysteries, phrases such as “staggering complexity” and “infinitely complex” have appeared in the literature. The sheer sophistication of the nano-world opening up before us has repeatedly shocked the research community. DNA is more information-rich than we imagined, and we now know that it is tethered to a mysterious control system that directs the molecular orchestra.
Our hope is that the vista upon vista of fantastic microscopic architecture we tour in these pages will inspire not only a deeper understanding of molecular biology but also a renewed sense of wonder and a measure of humble curiosity about what we have yet to learn. In a speech at Rice University in 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, “The greater our knowledge increases, the more our ignorance unfolds.” This truth manifestly applies to the life sciences. Biologists are probing ever deeper into the unknown. In doing so, we not only find out new truths, but also discover new vistas of ignorance. In the case of biological information, that dance of genetics and epigenetics, each new discovery raises fresh questions and opportunities to realize just how much we do not know, and how much more there is yet to discover.