Ken Miller and Chromosome Fusion

[Ed: This post, from October 12, 2010, is worth a second look in light of Carl Zimmer’s recent piece on human chromosome fusion]

In the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court case, federal judge John Jones was heavily influenced by the first expert witness, evolutionist Ken Miller. As Jones later recalled, he “was taken to school.” Unfortunately what Miller “taught” Jones was a series of scientific misrepresentations. Miller focused on two examples from molecular biology: a pseudogene and a fused chromosome. In both cases Miller gave Jones many facts but the lessons were carefully tailored to misrepresent both the science and evolutionary theory.

As I explained here, Miller’s pseudogene example included four key misrepresentations: that the pseudogene has no function and is broken, that the pseudogene DNA sequence has “errors” or “mistakes,” that there is no reason for broken genes aside from common descent, and that the evolutionary interpretation of such pseudogenes is objective science.

As was well known and documented when Miller and the ACLU lawyers devised Miller’s testimony, pseudogenes that had been investigated often exhibited functional roles, such as gene expression, gene regulation and generation of genetic diversity. Pseudogenes were found to be involved in gene conversion or recombination with functional genes. Pseudogenes sequences were found to be conserved with reduced nucleotide variability, excess synonymous over nonsynonymous nucleotide polymorphism, and other features that are expected in genes that have functional roles.

Any expert witness testifying on such a narrow topic would have been well aware of these well known results which were published by leading researchers in top tier scientific journals. And yet Miller gave no such perspective to the Dover court, and instead unequivocally represented his pseudogene example as non functional and broken. That was the evolutionary interpretation of pseudogenes, not what the scientific evidence was indicating.

And even if Miller’s selected pseudogene was truly broken, that would not mandate an evolutionary explanation as Miller unequivocally stated to the court. Miller told judge Jones that a pseudogene found in different cousin species, with common mutations, “must mean that these two organisms are descended with modification from another organism” and “leads us to just one conclusion,” which is evolution’s common descent. But this too was a lie, as any expert witness on this topic would know of the many instances of pseudogenes with mutations common to multiple species that do not fit the evolutionary pattern. In these cases even evolutionists must admit that common descent does not explain the mutations.

Perhaps most importantly, Miller’s pseudogene testimony misrepresented the evolutionary argument as objective science whereas Miller and the evolutionists, when not in federal court, make one religious argument after another. The religious foundation of evolution goes back to 18th century Enlightenment and before, and would automatically expel evolution from our public schools.

Miller’s pseudogene argument was just another example of a centuries-long history of religious mandates for evolution. Miller had been making such religious arguments for many years before Dover. He argued that life revealed features “that no engineer would stand for” so they must have evolved. That may be true, but such knowledge cannot come from objective science.

As Miller informed the Dover court, his pseudogene example was “just a mess.” That’s one of his favorite ways of making evolution’s religious argument. As he wrote more than 10 years before Kitzmiller:

In short, this sixth gene [the same pseudogene Miller testified of in the Dover court] is a mess, a nonfunctional stretch of useless DNA. From a design point of view, pseudogenes are indeed mistakes. So why are they there? Intelligent design cannot explain the presence of a nonfunctional pseudogene, unless it is willing to allow that the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles.

It is a powerful argument, but it is not scientific. Miller routinely makes these religious arguments in his books and presentations, but they were carefully edited out for his testimony to the Dover court.

The ACLU lawyers and evolutionists argued that Intelligent Design is a religious theory because there was religious intent. They carefully traced this in early documents. But in evolutionary theory no such careful tracing is needed. The religious claims are boldly pronounced by evolutionists all through their literature. Darwin’s book was chocked full of religious claims, and today’s evolutionists are no different.

This hypocrisy of evolutionary thinking was equally evident in the second of the two examples Miller presented to the Dover court. In that example, Miller showed evidence that two of our chromosomes have been fused together and claimed it was powerful evidence for evolution: “the closer that we can get to looking at the details of the human genome, the more powerful the evidence has become.”

But from a scientific perspective, the fusion event occurred in, and spread through, the human population. There is no evolutionary relationship revealed. Even if evolution is true, this fusion event would give us no evidence for it. The fused chromosome did not arise from another species, it was not inherited from a human-chimp common ancestor, or any other purported common ancestor.

The reason why evolutionists find this argument to be so powerful is, once again, from a religious perspective. According to evolutionists, the evidence mandates evolution because it disproves creation and design. As evolutionist Barry Starr explains:

An alternative explanation is that the designers fused the two chromosomes together when they created humans. ...

The difficulty with this idea is that there is no obvious advantage to having 46 chromosomes instead of 48. ...

And even if there were, a designer who can easily put in the 60 million or so differences between humans and chimpanzees should be able to accomplish whatever results a chromosome fusion gives more elegantly than sticking two ape chromosomes together.

The power of the argument is not that evolution is confirmed, but rather than design is falsified. As Denis Alexander elaborates in his book Creation or Evolution, the fused chromosome “reveals our shared ancestry with the apes.” [211] Of course the chromosome reveals no such thing. It provides no more evidence for evolution than any other similarity. Starr, Alexander and the evolutionists may as well be discussing similarities we share with the apes in our bones or our biochemistry. But the evolutionists focus on cases such as the fused chromosome because these cases provide far more powerful religious evidence. As Alexander explains:

The suggestion that God has planted misleading ‘molecular fossils’ in our bodies is parallel to the suggestion that God planted misleading physical fossils in the rocks to test the faith of the believer. The obvious and profound theological problem with such a suggestion, as we considered in Chapter Six, is that it makes God into a deceiver on a grand scale. It would mean believing in a God who deliberately confuses people, making it look certain that we had shared common ancestry with the apes, when really this was not the case. [213]

And likewise Miller, when not deceiving federal judges, makes this same argument about the very evidence he presented in the Dover court:

So all we have to do is to look at our own genome, look at our own DNA, and see, do we have a chromosome that fits these features?

We do. It's human chromosome number 2, and the evidence is unmistakable. We have two centromeres, we have telomere DNA near the center, and the genes even line up corresponding to primate chromosome numbers 12 and 13.

Is there any way that intelligent design or special creation could explain why we have a chromosome like this? The only way that I can think of is if you're willing to say that the intelligent designer rigged chromosome number 2 to fool us into thinking that we had evolved. The closer we look at our own DNA, the more detailed a glimpse we get of our own genome, the more powerful the evidence becomes for our common ancestry with other species.

In his testimony, Miller told the Dover court that:

the closer that we can get to looking at the details of the human genome, the more powerful the evidence has become.

And when out of court, he makes the same statement:

The closer we look at our own DNA, the more detailed a glimpse we get of our own genome, the more powerful the evidence becomes for our common ancestry with other species.

The difference is he carefully omits the religion when in court. Nor did Miller reveal to the court that evolution is in no way required to explain the chromosome fusion evidence.

Miller also omitted several other inconvenient truths. Judge Jones said he received the equivalent of a degree in the expert testimony, but that degree didn’t include the fact that, beyond speculation, evolution has no explanation for how chromosomes evolved in the first place. And Miller did not explain the great number (more than a thousand) genes unique to the human genome. Again, beyond speculation evolution does not explain the rapid appearance of these novel genes. Indeed, as one evolutionist admitted, the secret to evolving a human from a chimp is to make fast changes in just the right places:

The way to evolve a human from a chimp-human ancestor is not to speed the ticking of the molecular clock as a whole. Rather the secret is to have rapid change occur in sites where those changes make an important difference in an organism’s functioning.

Finally, Miller presented the chromosome fusion evidence as a “beautiful” confirmation of an evolutionary prediction. What he didn’t explain to the court is that science is full of theories known to be false which yet make all kinds of confirmed predictions.

The Kitzmiller trial was one long series of misrepresentations. Yes judge Jones was schooled, but he didn’t learn the truth.