Do We Share 99% of Our Genes with the Town Mouse or the Country Mouse?

I asked a friend last night how long naturalism will be able to hold up against the onslaught of Stephan Meyer's argument in his Signature in the Cell. Meyer's basic thesis is that evolution by natural selection and random genetic mutation cannot explain the diversity of life much less the origin of life. The main problem here is that it can only select from what's there or change what's there. They cannot supply what's there. These mechanisms cannot produce genetic information, which is akin to digital code.

This would be like saying that the consumer market and viruses can account for all computer hardware and software. The consumer market selects particular computer hardware and software for survival, and virus and spyware can damage it, but neither of these impersonal agents can produce it. How do you go from computers the size of houses to iPads through consumer choices and hackers? Without intelligent computer programmers we would not only never have a computer but the iPad would never assault us with its sexy sleekness.

Now check this from James Le Fanu, a guest blogger at the Discovery Institute, who writes on " The Last Days of the Façade of Knowing":

Interchangeability across species reaches its apotheosis with the finding that we share 99% of our genes with a mouse. How so trivial a genetic difference can generate such diversity of form defies all explanation, other than to suppose it must be ‘something to do’ with gene regulation, ‘the turning on and off of genes at different times and places in the course of development’.

The implications are clear enough. Biologists could in theory sequence every living creature on the face of the planet, but this would only confirm they all share the same core set of genes that account for the nuts and bolts of the proteins and enzymes of the cell of which all living things are made. But beyond that the really interesting question — that of ‘form’ — what it is that so readily distinguishes the elephant from the octopus, fireflies from foxes would remain as elusive as ever.

The genetic instructions must be there of course because otherwise the tens of millions of our fellow species would not replicate themselves with such fidelity from generation to generation. But we are compelled in the light of these extraordinary findings of the recent past that we have no conception of why we should become so different from a worm or fly.

And the same applies though more significantly still to Darwin’s proposed mechanism of evolutionary transformation. There is, to be sure, persuasive evidence of a shared or common ancestry in the interchangeability of, for example, our genome with that of a mouse and our primate cousin — but beyond that the myriad of random genetic mutations that would provide a basis for the transformation of one form of life into another are nowhere to be found. “We cannot see in this why we are so different from chimpanzees”, observed Svante Paabo Chairman of the Chimpanzee Genome Project on its publication in 2005 — “part of the secret is hidden in there, but we don’t understand it”. Nothing has subsequently emerged to challenge that conclusion.

The standard scientific response to these anomalies and perplexities is to concede that ‘it’ has turned out to be much more complex than originally contemplated — which is certainly true. But nonetheless, the argument goes, the accumulation of yet more biological data, the sequencing of yet more genomes must eventually, like a bulldozer, drive a causeway through current perplexities. Perhaps, but more certainly, the reverse for the more that science progresses, the more genomes that are sequenced, the more striking the irresoluble discrepancy between the similarity of the genetic instructions and the diversity of the living world (click on post title to read the whole).