Francis Collins on ID and Evolution

One of the mailing lists I used to be on, and miss being on, is the ASA list. The ASA is the American Scientific Affiliation, a group of Christian scientists who are, for the most part, not creationists. Their listserv has long been home to debates over evolution and creationism that are of a higher caliber than those you usually hear. I was on that list for several years, but these days I've just got too many listservs going to keep up as it is. Anyway, Pim Van Meurs is still on the list and he pointed to an interesting report sent to that list by Louise Margaret Freeman, a psychology professor from Mary Baldwin College, about a talk given a few weeks ago by Francis Collins.

For those who haven't heard of him, Collins is the head of the Human Genome Project and is an enormously respected geneticist. He also happens to be a devout Christian who has not been shy about talking about his faith in public. This particular talk, given at the church he went to as a child in Virginia, was highly critical of ID creationism and strongly supportive of evolution, and like Ken Miller, Howard Van Till and others, he argues that ID will end up damaging Christianity rather than helping it. I'll post some excerpts from her report below the fold.

DNA shows that human beings are 99.9% alike as far as their genetic makeup goes. Understanding the 0.1% difference is critical to understanding why some people are more vulnerable to certain diseases than others. Furthermore, the chimpanzee genome has also recently been sequenced and shows 98.8% homology to humans. Some of the differences between humans and chimps are very interesting, particularly differences in genes responsible for control of brain size. DNA analysis also shows a picture of human origins different from a literal reading of Genesis: namely, modern humans come from a common ancestor pool of about 10,000 individuals (not 2) that lived in Africa about 100,000 years ago.

Collins went on to explain what Darwin's theory of evolution stated: 1) species change over time 2) variations appear spontaneously; most are harmful and are weeded out 3) some are beneficial to survival and therefore get passed to offspring, resulting in a net change and adaptation over time. He emphasized that the term theory is not used by scientists the same way it is used colloquially (as an unsupported hunch or hypothesis) but is instead a unifying principle that explains a whole host of observations. Darwin's theory is accepted by virtually all mainstream scientists, is not on the brink of collapse (despite what some Christians may say) but is instead supported by "rock solid" evidence from both the fossil record and DNA. Collins did not address the fossil record (that was apparently covered in the previous week's session, which I did not attend) but focused instead on DNA, particularly homologies as evidence for common descent...

He showed a hypothetical stretch of human DNA three genes (A, B, & C) and spacer regions between them, then the same three genes in the mouse. First, the genes are in the same order, as you would predict if they had a common ancestor. But, that is also consistent with design: perhaps those three genes work best together, so the designer put them there, Second, the coding regions (genes) are more homologous than the non-coding regions: exactly what evolution predicts, since the genes would be expected to be more resistant to change than non-coding regions. But again, that poses no special problem for design. Third, there is evidence "jumping genes" (or transposable elements); genes which jump and "land" and "get stuck" in the non-coding areas, often damaging themselves in the process, so they apparently are not coding for anything. Human and mouse also share these elements. This is harder to explain with design, but not impossible; perhaps this gene has a purpose not understood yet and therefore the designer had a reason for putting it there. Finally, however, Collins pointed to a transposable element that was "hopelessly damaged" and therefore could not possibly code for anything due to a lost (or truncated) element. The exact same letter was truncated in human and mouse. It is hard to see any design for this type of genetic evidence. It is, however, the exact thing a designer would put in the genome if he wanted to plant false evidence for common descent, perhaps to test the faith of the scientist. But Collins expressed doubts about a "charlatan" God that intentionally seeks to confuse us. A more reasonable explanation is that the mutation occurred in a common ancestor to mice and humans, some 80 million years ago. If so, you would expect to see this same element in many other mammals, and you do.

It is dangerous for Christians to maintain that evolution is a hoax in the face of such evidence; they are telling a "noble lie" and the damage will ultimately be to faith, not science....

Collins presented the Behe/Dembski view of ID (old earth, common descent): life proceeding more or less by "natural" mechanisms but with the Designer occasionally stepping in to "fix things." This view is certainly appealing to believers as an alternative to evolution; the problem, Collins feels, is that it's likely wrong. He cited the exampled of ID's "poster child," the bacterial flagellum as described by Behe. As we study more and more bacteria, it becomes more and more obvious that many of the 32 proteins that make up this "irreducibly complex" motor were recruited from other cellular components. Collins is concerned about the ID movement for a number of reasons: First, it falsely insists that evolution is wrong. Collins instead predicts that ID will be discredited within a fairly short time, as scientists come up with more and more evolutionary mechanisms to explain the existence of "irreducibly complex" structures. In that event, Christianity, not science, is what will look stupid. Second, ID strikes him as a "defense" of God from Darwin's theory, something Collins doesn't think God needs.

The local newspaper there also covered the talk, but put a misleading title on the article conflating "intelligent design" with Christianity. Collins argued that evolution and Christianity are compatible, not evolution and intelligent design.