For a number of years, many of us at UD have made the argument that evolutionary theory, in practice, is of almost no help whatsoever in getting at the secrets of biology. I’ve taken the position personally that it actually hurts, and that it is not a matter of indifference to the study of biology whether evolution is employed or not. ID is the way to go.
In this study reported on at Phys.Org, scientists looked at a particular portion of “non-coding” RNA in the zebra fish and found that it actually does code for a protein (which they call “Toddler”), and which turns out to be almost essential in the proper development of the embryo. Cutting out the sequence for “Toddler” results in improper development of, or the entire loss of, a heart, and subsequent death because the embryo fails to enter the gastrula stage of early embryonic development.
Here’s the important quote for the point I want to make:
“We have been interested in this question [of what triggers gastrulation] for 20 years,” Alexander Schier, the Leo Erikson Life Sciences Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and senior author of the study, said of discovering the new signal. “We’ve made a great deal of progress in understanding how these cells are made, but we could never really explain why these cells suddenly start to move. This new signal is part of the answer.”
They’ve studied this embryonic stage for 20 years, and couldn’t figure out the decisive signals for initiation of the gastrula. They had to look to “non-coding” RNA, i.e., “junk DNA,” in order to solve their new found secret.
And why didn’t they study “junk DNA” before? Well, evolutionary theory posits that it is “junk” (their word, not ours), so why investigate.
Meanwhile, ID would say this: the genes are the cells tools; how to use these tools and building materials MUST BE encoded in the “non coding” (nc) portions of DNA. IOW, from an ID perspective, one of the first moves one would make in studying why “cells suddenly start to move” would be look at the nc-DNA.
Has evolutionary theory put these scientists 20 years behind? I’ll let you be the judge of that.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-02-cells.html#jCp