Just published in the Journal of Molecular Biology is a paper by three research scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that will spread despondency among creationists—at least among those with the courage to read it and the understanding to grasp its significance. Another of their favourite god-shaped gaps has just been slammed shut.
The gap in question is the long-standing mystery of how the genetic code arose through natural processes, without the intervention of a supernatural intelligence. Creationists have long claimed that the genetic code is analogous to a computer program—something they assume must imply a programmer. They bolster this with the usual straw-man arguments and hand-waving about statistical impossibility, declaring that such complexity could not have arisen “by chance alone.”
Of course, that was never more than the familiar argument from ignorant incredulity coupled with the false dichotomy fallacy: because we don’t yet know something, it must have been their particular god. Not any of the other gods, of course—because those aren’t real.
What we do know is that the earliest forms of life appeared on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago, while the genetic code itself did not appear until some 800 million (0.8 billion) years later. Time, therefore, was not a limiting factor: there was no plan, no deadline, and no external programmer. That fact alone should give creationists cause for concern because any decent intelligent designer, especially an omniscient one, would not have taken 0.8 billion years to invent the genetic code.
Now, this team of researchers has produced a plausible explanation (and it only needs to be plausible to refute the claim that no explanation is possible). Their study is based on an analysis of 4.3 billion dipeptide sequences across 1,561 proteomes, representing organisms from all three domains of life: Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya. (Proteomes are the complete sets of proteins expressed in an organism.)
To rub salt into creationist wounds, the evidence points to the genetic code having emerged through an evolutionary “bootstrapping” process, in which improvements in the code itself led to improvements in the proteins that controlled the very process of coding — an elegant feedback loop with no need for divine intervention.
