Regulating the Regulators: A Single Arginine Insertion in the Glucocorticoid Receptor Changes Protein Expression

Damage Control Underway

Not only is evolution a fact beyond all reasonable doubt, it also is essential to ones understanding of biology. Indeed, without evolution, science itself would be impossible. These are the pronouncements of evolutionists who even go so far as to define life as the ability to evolve. Given these truths one would think that evolutionary theory would be rather important for research in the life sciences. Is not the evolutionary framework a necessary starting point? Surprisingly scientific progress consistently is made without evolution leading the way or even pointing in the right direction. Often evolutionists are surprised by the science and new evolutionary explanations are tacked on after the fact rather than providing the initial insight. Other times evolution simply is not even mentioned as it simply makes no sense on the science.

Consider, for example, transcription factors—proteins that influence and control the transcription of genes, which leads to the synthesis of new proteins. Evolution cannot explain how these genetic regulators evolved, and even if they did somehow evolve they don’t fit the expected evolutionary pattern.

But that’s only the beginning. Transcription factors operate according to instructions and codes that also don’t fit the evolutionary pattern, and their mechanisms are incredibly complex, including secondary regulation where a transcription factor influences a different transcription factor. You can read more about these marvels here, here and here.

Now new research on the glucocorticoid receptor—a transcription factor that, for example, helps to activate sugar production in the liver—presents yet more contradictions to evolutionary theory.

The glucocorticoid receptor has several components, one of which is a lever arm. After the glucocorticoid receptor gene is transcribed (a process that is influenced by yet other transcription factors), the messenger RNA transcript can be edited to produce different versions of the glucocorticoid receptor protein. In one such version a single arginine amino acid is inserted into the lever arm region. This single modification influences both how the different glucocorticoid receptor components communicate, and what types of DNA sequences the glucocorticoid receptor is likely to bind to. The result of all this is a change in the genes which are regulated and the magnitude of their regulation.

The editing machinery that inserts the single arginine amino acid is incredibly complicated. Under evolution we would have to believe that random mutations just happened to construct the fantastic editing machinery, a feat for which there is no explanation.

But evolution would have to repeat these heroics a large number of times to search through the astronomical number of different edits that are possible. How many amino acids should be edited? Should they be deleted or added? Which amino acids should be used? On which gene transcripts should the editing be performed? And where in the transcript should the edit be made?

And how did the evolutionists respond to these findings? In spite of the fact that this arginine insertion edit occurs in widespread species, they wonder if the whole operation isn’t just a mistake. A simple consequence of erroneous editing that is tolerated.

This is always the first guess of evolutionary theory. For if all of biology spontaneously arose via chance events, then we should expect to find a collection of broken or barely functional designs. But in the inexorable march of science, such assumptions are inevitably found to be false. Functional reasons are discovered, ascribed to evolution’s natural selection, and then it is on to the next finding which is assumed to be yet another erroneous design because, after all, evolution is a fact.