Spliceosomes and Exons: The New Agents of Evolution

What a Mess, Alternative Splicing is Not Conserved Across Different Species

Remember when evolution created all of biology one mutation at a time? That quaint idea from your high school biology class was about as likely as an alien world smashing into the Earth last Friday. But at least it had the virtue of not being circular. No such luck today as now evolution has to create itself. Call it evolvability, call it pre planned evolutionary pathways or call it just plain serendipity, it all means the same thing: Evolution must have constructed elaborate mechanisms and structures which then became crucial agents of evolution, creating all kinds of biological wonders. Simply put, evolution must have created evolution. In recent years such serendipity in the evolution narrative has skyrocketed. If it were a stock you would be a millionaire by now. And the latest IPOs are the spliceosomes and exons which, if evolution is true, must be crucial in the creation of, err, pretty much all the higher species.

You learned in your high school that genes are segments of DNA, but it is a bit more complicated than that. For starters, in the higher species a gene is often not a continuous segment of DNA but rather is interrupted several times by intervening segments. So there are the segments that make up the gene (called exons for expressed regions) and then there are the intervening segments (called introns for intervening regions).

Of course evolutionists figured that the introns were a big mistake and this genetic architecture was a big kludge. This despite the astonishingly complex spliceosome machine that removes the introns from the gene copy and glues the exons together. Evolutionists figured that evolution just happened to create and insert the supposedly worthless introns (evolutionists never could decide if the introns have been there all along or if they were inserted later in evolutionary history) and then just happened to create the fantastic spliceosome machine that just happened to know where to make the cuts to remove the introns and just happened to know how to glue the exon pieces back together.

Of course, as usual, evolutionists had to recant their just-so story as introns, while far from completely understood, are definitely not worthless. Evolutionists still insist the whole apparatus somehow evolved, though they have no idea how.

One of the features of the exon/intron genetic architecture is that it allows for alternative splicing schemes. In fact, incredibly, a given gene can have thousands of different forms depending on how the spliceosome machine edits the gene. And these alternative splicing schemes vary between tissue. In other words, the alternative splicing schemes are tissue-specific.

But new research adds yet more monumental problems for evolution, for these alternative splicing schemes are often not conserved between otherwise similar species. Evolution says that traits of different species should fall into the evolutionary tree, common descent, pattern.

Instead we now must believe that evolution not only (i) somehow created this fantastic architecture and apparatus with its spliceosomes, exons, introns and alternative splicing schemes, and evolution must have (ii) tailored those alternative splicing schemes for the different tissues, but evolution must also have (iii) changed the schemes even between similar species.

This forces evolution into yet another unlikely epicycle. Namely, those alternative splicing schemes must have been instrumental in the creation of the new species as they evolved. As one evolutionist explained:

But the core things that make a mouse a mouse may disproportionately derive from splicing patterns that differ from those of rats or other mammals.

So an important part of the evolution of a new species, such as a rat, must have been the redesign of the alternative splicing schemes. In other words, evolution occurs at the alternate splicing level. But this means that, for such evolution to occur, evolution must first have constructed the spliceosomes, exons/introns and alternative splicing architecture and apparatus.

And furthermore it means that this architecture and apparatus must have evolved in such a way that those alternative splicing schemes could easily evolve to new and different schemes which would help to create new species.

So evolution was not merely a series of random mutations accumulating and causing new species to arise. As unlikely as that is, evolution must also have created various structures which, themselves, became agents of evolution. I guess once one has come to believe that something comes from nothing then anything goes.