Tales of Future Evolutionary Pasts

Organization: evolv-o-tron, inc.
From: Deaddog 
Message-ID: 
Newsgroups: talk.origins



Now wait.

A
 long
     honking
            time.

Joshua Lederbug looks up from his sequencer, his antennae
twitching in consternation.  "Francis!  Francis!  Come
quickly, I need you."

Francis Cricket springs into the room.  "What is it Joshua?"

"Francis, you know how I've battled the establishment, how
I believe that the morphology of extant organisms is
inadequately explained by the so-called "Theory of Descent?"

"Yes, Joshua," sighs Francis, who has in fact heard his
mentor ramble on time and again.  They have tried to run
Joshua's Creationist Theories past the social insect
bureaucracy many times, with little success.  No
matter that evolutionary arguments held little water --
that the extreme divergence of organisms could not be
accommodated within the known history of Earth, that the
radioactive isochrons clearly pointed towards a singular
origin of life, yet the molecular clocks that Joshua had
spent his life measuring suggested that there was no possible
way that genetic change could have accumulated so rapidly.
The social insects had their own agenda, and it behooved them
to speak of 'higher' and 'lower' organisms as though such
things could have been brought about through genetic change.

"Now they shall have to listen!" chortles Joshua.

"What have you found?" asks Francis, growing interested.

"Do you recall how we have recently discovered episomes ...
what I've called plasmids ... in some bacterial strains?"

"Yes, of course."

"Well, I have finally managed to sequence one.  Look!"

The restriction enzymes that the two had developed and
(belatedly) patented to assist in their researches had very
distinct recognition sequences.  They were quite useful in
breaking up DNA to manageable size fragments.  And they
occurred, on average, once every 4000 base pairs.  The two
bugs were used to finding them more or less randomly
scattered about genomes.

But now this.

"My Bug, Joshua, it's ... it's all of them.  Together!"

"Yes, my friend.  EcoRI, BamHI, HindIII, and several more
that I don't think we even know.  All together.  In one
place.  In precise alignment."

"But what can it mean?"

"Mean?  It's a message!  These were *put* here!  This plasmid
was made!  Created!  No process of random evolution assorted
these restriction sites in this contrived way."

"Astounding ... but perhaps this is a ... template to tell
different bacteria about restriction specificities?"

"Are you mad?!  It would be a suicide plasmid!  This is not
a transferred episome; look, we've only found it in this
extremely odd endosymbiotic bacteria in certain ancient
trees.  And look at this!  The coding sequence for an enzyme
that is highly related to our own glutathione transferase ...
yet it is in a bacteria!  What is it doing there?  And look
here, if my eyes do not mistake me that is an intron!  In a
bacteria!"

"Well, it is an endosymbiont ...."

"Bah, this bacteria does not even have the machinery for
splicing.  And the messages do not make it to the nucleus;
I've checked."

"Well, it certainly is odd.  But there must be a rational
explanation."

"There is!  This is a sign of Creation!  This is the work
of the Creator!"

[At this moment a group of Army Ants bust in and drag away
Joshua, kicking and screaming.  He is sedated and put into
an asylum.  Francis decides to continue his studies of
codon frequency in 'higher' organisms.]

{The moral?  Well, I sometimes wonder if the only evidence
of our existence that will survive us is the engineered
DNAs that we make.  Will a polylinker in a plasmid someday
tell our sad tale?  A fusion protein serve as our epitaph?}

{Technical details:  yes, mutation rates would have
obliterated most such evidence within a reasonable
time span.  Other signs, however, would probably remain, and
might in fact be recognizable to the bugs of the future.}

{Rationale:  why is Creation an unlikely possibility?  We'd
know what to look for.  The fingerprints of the Creator
would be evident.  Any scenario in which organisms were
Created would likely show evidence of design at the
molecular level.

We're still waiting for such evidence.

Evolution is most strongly, most convincingly, argued when
molecules are allowed to tell their stories.  Morphology is a
game for the expert, and one man's acquired trait is
another's design feature.  But molecules cannot be mistaken;
they scream the history of the world, and they are strident
in their support of evolution.}

Non-woof