The discovery of the Anonish genome mapping evokes religious associations among the politicians
By Uri Golomb, ujg20@cam.ac.uk
Recently we were informed of a discovery, which many compare to the greatest achievements of science in the XNUMXth century - such as the cracking of the atom and the landing on the moon. A discovery so important that the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain (politicians who usually do not show too much interest in science) announced it at a joint press conference. Two teams of scientists (by the way, their collaboration is news in itself - they showed a great deal of mutual rivalry until a short time ago) deciphered the initial draft of the human genome - the instruction book for building a human being.
Usually, when the media gives sensational headlines to scientific discoveries, the scientists tend to cool the enthusiasm a bit. They are more careful, and try to present things only as hypotheses, or preliminary proofs. Something of this is evident this time as well - the scientists reminded us that this is still only a preliminary draft of the genome, some of the information is still missing, and to freely paraphrase one of the speakers: "The book is (mostly) in front of us, but we are just beginning to learn to read it." But this time even they were caught with enthusiasm, and some of the grandiose imagery I quoted above came from the scientists, not the politicians. So is the claim, only somewhat cautionary, of one of the speakers, who said that he would be very surprised if in 20 years we don't have new and much more effective tools to treat cancer. On the other hand, there were also very careful discussions of the ethical problems raised by the discovery, such as the possibility of discrimination (on the part of employers and insurance companies, for example) against people whose genetic load indicates a tendency to certain diseases; Not to mention (although some have talked) about the possibility of designing humans before their birth... In England (where I currently live), many interviewed the scientific advisor to the government, who heads a team that will examine the ethical and legal implications of the discovery and its applications.
It is clear, then, that something very important has happened.
Mapping the human genome from the article: The goal - a world without diseases by Eran Tiefenbron and Ilan Nachshon, London Yedioth Ahronoth, 27.6.2000/XNUMX/XNUMX is published on the Freedom website with kind permission from the Yedioth Ahronoth system.
I do not intend to go into the details of the discovery and its implications here (for those interested, there are enough sources of information on the Internet and beyond; two "links" are provided at the end of the article). But one thing caught my attention, which may be of particular interest to the readers of the Freedom site - the constant reference to God, especially among the politicians and media people. (I emphasize again that I am talking about the media in England - I do not know how the media in Israel treated the discovery). From the way some of them talked about it, one would think they had discovered a new proof of God's existence. Dr. Francis Collins, one of the heads of the Human Genome Project, said that he caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God" "It is humbling for me and awe inspiring to realize that we have awe-inspiring and humbling that we can catch a first glimpse of our instruction book, which until now was known only to God]; Whereas the US president said: "Today we are learning the language in which God created life" [Today we are learning the language in which God created life].
Not everyone talked about God. For example, Dr. John Sulston, also from the Human Genome Project, put it this way: human being" for the first time we are going to hold in our hands the set of instructions to make a "We've now got to the point in human history where [we have reached the point in human history where, for the first time, we can hold in our hands the set of instructions for creating a human being] - more or less the same message as Collins, but without mentioning God (perhaps, like Laplace, he also does not need this hypothesis). Sulston was interviewed, along with Craig Ventur (the head of the industrial project in the United States, which competed with the Human Genome Project), on the British Channel 4, and the interviewer asked both of them if the discovery brought them closer to God. Both elegantly dodged the question, Ventor even mentioned the "terrible" word evolution. And if you don't mention evolution when talking about genetics - when will you mention it?
I guess some would have reacted more harshly to the question. I know of several people (the most prominent among them is of course Richard Dawkins), whose exposure to genetics actually contributed to alienating them from God. In all the quotes I mentioned, at least no one talked about "the code in which God created man". Clinton spoke of the "creation of life", and Collins spoke of a God who knows our code, not a God who created it. They also refrained from specifying what kind of god they were talking about, the personal god of monotheistic religions (Francis Collins is a devout Christian), or the "god of the philosophers" of the deists.
According to the freedom dictionary definitions, I am an agnostic (although my agnosticism is not that far from atheism), and talking about God should not have bothered me. But still, something about it bothered me. I have the feeling that the speakers, even if they did not mean the personal God themselves, deliberately kept vague, with the expectation that at least some of their listeners would interpret the words according to religious belief. These things are certainly reminiscent of those who continue to use the argument "the heavens tell glory to God": the claim that the wonders of nature point to their very existence, their beauty and complexity - to the existence of God.
That is why it is worth mentioning once again: genetics is precisely in the agnostic-atheistic field. The knowledge we already had about the genome before the current project certainly did not help to advance the "science" of creationism. We have known for years that the genetic code of the human race is not a unique phenomenon - it was created on the basis of the genetic codes of other creatures, in a gradual and natural process that did not require any intervention on the part of an intelligent being (that is, without the need for God).
By the way, religious people find it convenient to claim (as Clinton hinted) that DNA is essential to life in any form. Because it is indeed a complex mechanism like no other, which seems to have been designed by an intelligent being. However, to the best of my knowledge, most scientists working in the field claim that the first living creatures on Earth were based on much simpler replication methods than DNA, which were used in retrospect as a sort of "scaffold" on which DNA was built. As happens with many scaffolds, they are "thrown away" after they have served their purpose: from the moment the DNA appeared, it was much more efficient at replicating itself than the simple forms that preceded it, so they disappeared.
To the best of my knowledge, the theories regarding previous simple forms are still in development stages - there is room to strengthen the arguments and evidence. But the fact that science today does not have a complete theory based on the creation of life does not prove that it will not arrive at such a theory in the future. It is certainly not proof that the religious answer - "God created life through verbal instructions" - is the correct one. Non-genetics invalidated several cornerstones of the Book of Genesis theory - among other things, the claim that each and every creature was created separately, with a special and separate status for humans. As Dr. Thom Shakespeare from the University of New Castle said, chimpanzees - it is not genetics that makes us human" "We share 51% of our genes with yeast and 98% with Chimpanzees - genetics is not what makes us human].
But on second thought, this project nevertheless proves the uniqueness of man. Show me one other species on earth that would even think of trying to decipher its own or any other creature's genetic code.
Uri Golomb ujg20@cam.ac.uk
Uri Golomb is a student at the University of Cambridge, England.
First published on the Freedom website 11.9.2000
(Courtesy of the freedom site www.hofesh.org.il)
