The Gene Myth: Our DNA is NOT Our Destiny

Scientific research has shown that 87-98% of mental and physical and behavioral illnesses come from our thought life, which is indubitably a large and frightening number, and contrary to what many of us have been led to believe. In fact, few human processes are turned on or off by a single gene. Most processes require many genes acting together to produce a common result. Thus, the idea fired up by the media that there is a gene for this and a gene for that is incorrect. From second to second, day-by-day, genetic cascades are turned on or off by our own thoughts and experience. Yes, that means we are largely in control!

This picture of a multiplicity of genes that fluctuate moment by moment is at odds with the picture ingrained in the public mind: that genes determine everything from our physical characteristics to our behavior. It’s a highly fashionable concept that there is a “gene for this and a gene for that”, and, in particular, it removes personal responsibility from us as individuals. This is unhealthy and contrary to what God teaches us, which is to take responsibility for the thoughts we think and choices we make. Fortunately, since the 1970s research has been challenging the “gene myth” and now we know that the genes in the neurons of our brains are activated 87-98% by our thoughts with embedded emotions, which, of course, challenges the cause and effect model of genetic causation.

You are What you Think: 75-98% of Mental and Physical Illnesses Come from our Thought Life!

This is a staggering and eye-opening statistic because it also means that only 2-25% of human mental and physical illnesses come from the environment and genes! Scientists are discovering the precise pathways by which changes in human consciousness (thinking) produce changes in our brain and bodies. This consciousness activates our genes and changes our brain. Science even shows that thoughts, with their embedded feelings, turn sets of genes on and off in complex relationships. We take the facts, experiences and the events of our lives and assign meaning to them through thinking—we are reacting to the events and circumstances of life.

We may have a fixed set of genes in our chromosomes, but which of those genes is active and how they are active has a great deal to do with how we think and process our subjective experiences, i.e. our reactions. Our thoughts, with their intertwined emotions, produce words and behaviors, which in turn stimulate more thinking, choices and thought building. We are constantly reacting to the circumstances and events of this life and as this cycle goes on, our brains become shaped in a process that will either be in a positive direction or a negative direction. So it is the quality of our thinking and choices, our reactions, which determine our brain architecture. This means that the quality of our thinking (consciousness) affects the shape or architecture of the brain and resultant quality of health in our minds and bodies. Science and scripture show how we are wired for love and optimism (scripture: “we are made in His image”; scientifically: see my book “The Gift in You”), and so when we react by thinking negatively and making negative choices, the quality of our thinking suffers, which means the quality of our “brain architecture” suffers, and, in turn, our health.

It doesn’t matter where you live, if you believe in God, you WILL be healthier!

Over the last few years research has been showing that a belief in a loving and benevolent god has many health benefits. A large proportion of these studies have been done in the USA but now in a large Norwegian longitudinal health study called HUNT, researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) were able to find a clear relationship between time spent in church and lower blood pressure in both women and men.

It was initially thought that the large cultural and religious differences between the US and Norway would make it difficult to apply findings from the US to Norway. However, despite these differences, and the fact that only 4% of Norwegians (as opposed to the 40% of Americans) go to church on a weekly basis, the findings of the health benefits of believing in God were almost identical: those who were religiously active were healthier than those who were not religiously active!
(http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111223114042.htm#.TvyJ-uy0-ps.mailto)

Other research shows that those who attend church were 30% less likely to suffer depression and those who believe God have a sense of purpose and are 70% less likely to be depressed. (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081023120228.htm)

Zombie science

"Although the classical ideal is that scientific theories are evaluated by a careful teasing-out of their internal logic and external implications, and checking whether these deductions and predictions are in-line-with old and new observations; the fact that so many vague, dumb or incoherent scientific theories are apparently believed by so many scientists for so many years is suggestive that this ideal does not necessarily reflect real world practice.  In the real world it looks more like most scientists are quite willing to pursue wrong ideas for so long as they are rewarded with a better chance of achieving more grants, publications and status."

To say "that the theory is phoney, and always was phoney, and this is why it so singularly fails to predict reality is regarded as simplistic, crass, merely a sign of lack of sophistication.  And anyway, there are... the reputations of numerous scientists who are now successful and powerful on the back of the phoney theory, and who by now control the peer review process (including allocation of grants, publications and jobs) so there is a powerful disincentive against upsetting the apple cart."

"Zombie science is science that is dead but will not lie down."  "Zombie science is supported because it is useful propaganda.  Zombie science is deployed in arenas such as political rhetoric, public administration, management, public relations, marketing and the mass media generally.  It persuades, it constructs taboos, it buttresses some kind of rhetorical attempt to shape mass opinion.  Indeed, zombie science often comes across in the mass media as being more plausible than real science."

Charlton, Bruce G. 2008. Zombie science: A sinister consequence of evaluating scientific theories purely on the basis of enlightened self-interest. Medical Hypotheses, Vol. 71, pp. 327-329.

The Mind of the Evolutionist

" 'Contemporary evolutionary thinking maintains that smaller island mammals will rapidly grow larger towards the optimal size, while bigger animals will rapidly shrink.' "  Evolutionists call this Optimal Body Size Theory, or OST.  A member of a research team was interviewed about their study that "looked at a theoretical optimum body size towards which mammals are expected to grow, on both island communities and on the mainland."  " 'There is a tendency to believe that big animals become very small on islands, and small animals become very big, due to limited resources or lack of competition.  I've shown that this is just not true, at least not as a general rule.' "  "Incorporating large data sets that compared body sizes on various islands and on mainland communities, Dr. Meiri and his colleagues found no such tendency for bizarrely-sized animals to develop on islands.  'We concluded that the evolution of body sizes is as random with respect to "isolation" as on the rest of the planet.  This means that you can expect to find the same sort of patterns on islands and on the mainland.'  Dr. Meiri attributes our widely held misperceptions about 'dragons and dwarfs' to the fact that people tend to notice the extremes more if they are found on islands."  "Darwin's fascination with the Galapagos island chain... is just one example."  " 'I think it's purely a psychological bias,' Dr. Meiri concludes.  'It's just magical thinking.  Nothing more.' "-- 'Magical Thinking' About Islands an Illusion?  Biologist Refutes Conventional Thinking on Evolution. July 8, 2010. Science Daily, online news release.

"We found no support for any of the predictions of the optimal size theory."  "The concept of a single optimal body size is not supported by the data that were thought most likely to show it."  "It is remarkable that this theory fails to apply under the circumstances which best match its predictions (on islands)."-- Raia, Pasquale, Francesco Carotenuto, Shai Meiri. 2010. One size does not fit all: no evidence for an optimal body size on islands. Global Ecology and Biogeography, Vol. 19, pp. 475-484.

Evolutionists claim to rely only on natural forces, but natural forces cannot design and build new plants and animals.  So they add magical thinking, the perfect description of the evolutionist mind.

Repairing mutations

So duplicate genes are not macroevolution's secret laboratory.  Furthermore, everyone agrees that harmful mutations appear many, many times more often than mutations needed for new construction ever could.  Over those millions of years, slightly harmful mutations that are hidden, or not destructive enough for natural selection to remove, would also quietly accumulate.  This would produce creatures loaded up with highly polluted genes.  Survival of the barely functional?  We do not find this either because cells have mechanisms that maintain the original design of a creature within its variation boundaries, and minimize the accumulation of mutations.  These include:

• A proofreading system that catches almost all errors
• A mismatch repair system to back up the proofreading system
• Photoreactivation (light repair)
• Removal of methyl or ethyl groups by O6 - methylguanine methyltransferase
• Base excision repair
• Nucleotide excision repair
• Double-strand DNA break repair
• Recombination repair
• Error-prone bypass³⁶

Harmful mutations happen constantly.  Without repair mechanisms, life would be very short indeed and might not even get started because mutations often lead to disease, deformity, or death.  So even the earliest, "simple" creatures in the evolutionist's primeval soup or tree of life would have needed a sophisticated repair system.  But the mechanisms not only remove harmful mutations from DNA, they would also remove mutations that evolutionists believe build new parts.  The evolutionist is stuck with imagining the evolution of mechanisms that prevent evolution, all the way back to the very origin of life.

Genome size

Scientists have found that the number of genes a creature has is not a good measure of how complex it is.  For example, the human genome is 23 times larger than the fruit fly genome (3.2 billion base pairs versus 137 million), yet humans have only about 2 times the number of protein coding genes (almost 25,000 versus 13,000 according to Human Genome Project Information).  Yeast has about 6,000 genes.

		The tiny water flea Daphnia pulex has more genes than humans do; up to 39,000 at last count.Water Flea Boasts Whopper Gene Count. 5 June 2009. Science, Vol. 324, No. 5932, p. 1252.
		So does the pea aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum , with 34,600.Water Flea Boasts Whopper Gene Count. 5 June 2009. Science, Vol. 324, No. 5932, p. 1252.

The main reason for biological complexity must be in the rest of the genome, the non-coding part, which determines how those genes are used.

Junk DNA

Only a small portion of a creature's DNA is protein-coding genes (around 1.5% in humans).  In the 1970s, evolutionists began calling the rest of it "junk DNA", saying this collection of useless evolutionary debris showed there was no intelligent design involved.  Decades later, researchers are finding that the "junk" does vital work.  Some of this DNA plays a role in turning genes on and off at the right moments in a developing embryo²⁴.  Other bits separate coding and regulating sections, like punctuation marks in writing, so that DNA is not a long run-on sentence²⁵.  Other bits called Alu elements, found only in primates, can be spliced in or out during RNA processing to make different versions of the same gene.²⁶  The "junk" label discouraged research into this part of the genome for many years; who would want to waste their time studying it?

Networks

The living things of the world are extremely varied and intricately made, yet the theory of evolution has always been about simplicity: once upon a time, some chemicals assembled, began to make copies of themselves, and little by little changed into all life forms.  Evolutionists like to use the words "simply" and "merely" when telling their stories to the public.  There is certainly nothing complicated about the idea of mutation-natural selection.  However, by the year 2000, research had reached a point where a new branch of biology was needed: Systems Biology.  Discoveries in this field are the exact opposite of merely simple.  Biological systems are vastly more complex than anyone could imagine.  Some wonder if we will ever fully understand them.

A small section of a biological system in an organism, displayed as a 3D network

"To make sense of the genome, systems biologists think in terms of networks.  If two kinds of proteins or other biological molecules interact, they are connected on the network."  "These network diagrams... show how individual pathways crisscross to form a tangled web.  Each protein in a pathway can interact with molecules in other pathways, sometimes dozens of them."  Additionally, "systems biologists produce complex maps of how genes and proteins interact, and these maps help scientists analyze results from drug screening."  "Cells 'talk' to each other by passing chemical signals back and forth.  They also sense their physical surroundings through proteins on their surfaces called integrins.  All these cues serve to orient the cells in the body and inform them about how to behave so that they cooperate with the rest of the cells in the tissue."  "The cells are not complete by themselves.  They need signals from outside," says Mina J. Bissell of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  "The unit of function literally is the tissue."-- Patrick Barry. April 5, 2008. You, in a dish: cultured human cells could put lab animals out of work for chemical and drug testing. Science News, Vol. 173, No. 14, pp. 218-220.

"The interesting point coming out of all these studies is how complex these systems are; the different feedback loops and how they cross-regulate each other and adapt to perturbations are only just becoming apparent.  The simple pathway models are a gross oversimplification of what is actually happening", says Mike Tyers, a systems biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK.-- Blow, Nathan. 16 July 2009. Untangling the protein web. Nature, Vol. 460, pp. 415-418.

This is a map of how the genes in a cell of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiaeinteract with one another.  Each color shows what a group of genes does.  Genes in these functional networks interact with other genes throughout the cell; a cell of yeast.

Costanzo, Micha