Here’s That Study That Found Pseudo-Pseudogenes

Evolution is Getting Demolished

It is one of the strongest arguments for evolution: dysteleology, the apparent lack of design in the biological world. And the most obvious and compelling examples of such dysteleology are in the genome. And the most celebrated examples of dysteleology in the genome are the pseudogenes—genes which are broken. They are the long since abandoned junk of the genome. And the most obvious example of such brokenness is a stop codon that has accidentally arisen somewhere in the middle of the gene. These so-called premature termination codons (PTCs) halt the production of proteins in mid-stream. And the most abundant source of pseudogenes is the olfactory receptor families—genes involved in detecting odors. All those pseudogenes are a sure sign that no designer worth his salt would have constructed such a world. Evolution must be true, as evolutionists from Charles Darwin to Jerry Coyne have proclaimed. There’s only one problem—such examples of junk always turn out to be false.

At evolution’s foundation is the claim of lack of function, and that is a terrible argument. First of all, it is metaphysical rather than scientific. It is not a positivist argument—evolutionists have no idea how genes, or anything else for that matter—actually evolved. The argument is that such nonfunctional structures would never have been designed or created. That conclusion does not come from science, and cannot be tested by science. It is a religious argument.

But in addition to the metaphysics, showing that a structure has no function makes no sense to begin with. For one would have to watch the structure, in the organism, for the entire life of the organism. And one would have to be able to measure function—all possible functions. Needless to say, no evolutionist has ever done that.

But it gets worse.

Not only is the dysteleology argument religious and nonsensical, it is also false. At least in the cases that have been investigated. Over and over, the long lists evolutionists make of nonfunctional structures just get shorter and shorter.

That brings us to pseudogenes.

For sometime it has been known that not all pseudogenes are pseudogenes. That is, not all pseudogenes are junk. Some pseudogenes have been found to be performing useful functions. But typically these are onesies, twosies.

Now, a new study has found something more interesting—a PTC in an olfactory receptor pseudogene that, in certain contexts, is not actually a termination codon after all. The gene has a stop codon, and yet the gene is successfully used to create a protein. The translation process somehow can read-through what normally would be a stop codon. The paper suggests this is accomplished with a near-cognate tRNA, which inserts an amino acid rather than causing a halt:

We suggest that read-through is due to PTC recognition by a near-cognate tRNA that allows insertion of an amino acid instead of translation termination.

What appeared to be a pseudogenes is actually functional. It is a pseudo pseudogene.

Furthermore, and importantly, this is not an isolated case. They found other examples, and conclude this could be a “widespread phenomenon.”

Pseudogenes are generally considered to be non-functional DNA sequences that arise through nonsense or frame-shift mutations of protein-coding genes. … We identify functional PTC-containing loci within different olfactory receptor repertoires and species, suggesting that such “pseudo-pseudogenes” could represent a widespread phenomenon.

Widespread phenomenon? This adds yet more support to the Project Encode suggestion, which evolutionists immediately pushed back on, that most of the genome is functional rather than junk as evolutionists had insisted (for example, see here, here, and here).

Pseudogenes comprise only a small fraction of the genome, but they have served as the poster child of junk DNA, and proof of evolution.

Instead, once again history appears to be reliable guide as pseudogenes appear to be going down the same path as those other supposedly “nonfunctional” structures. Instead of nonfunctional, pseudogenes are beginning to look like they may have a rather sophisticated function that was not apparent to evolutionists.

Of course function is often not apparent to evolutionists because they view biology as an accident. Organisms are built on a vast number of chance events so of course they will be found to be full of mistakes.

But in its inexorable march of progress, science always seems to find function. Evolution seeks lack of function, which makes no sense, and science just keeps on finding more function. Evolution and science, it seems, are in an eternal conflict.

Don’t expect contriteness anytime soon though. For evolutionists, the finding of function was never a problem. It simply is an example of evolution finding function for what was nonfunctional. The junk was repaired and took on some new function. In fact, it remains powerful evidence for evolution because it is obviously so quirky. When the supposedly “backward” retina of the mammalian eye was found to be incredibly sophisticated, evolutionists didn’t miss a beat. After all, it was still a kludge of a design. As Richard Dawkins put it, “it is the principle of the thing that would offend any tidy-minded engineer!”

So it really doesn’t matter how much function is found, and how optimal a design is. For man has found nature to be wanting, and so it must have formed by chance. This, in a nutshell, is Epicureanism.

Religion drives science, and it matters.