Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design [Hardcover]

John C. Avise (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 12, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0195393430 | ISBN-13: 978-0195393439

Humanity's physical design flaws have long been apparent--we get hemorrhoids and impacted wisdom teeth, for instance--but do the imperfections extend down to the level of our genes? Inside the Human Genome is the first book to examine the philosophical question of why, from the perspectives of biochemistry and molecular genetics, flaws exist in the biological world. Distinguished evolutionary geneticist John Avise offers a panoramic yet penetrating exploration of the many gross deficiencies in human DNA--ranging from mutational defects to built-in design faults--while at the same time offering a comprehensive treatment of recent findings about the human genome. The author shows that the overwhelming scientific evidence for genomic imperfection provides a compelling counterargument to intelligent design. He also develops a case that theologians should welcome rather than disavow these discoveries. The evolutionary sciences can help mainstream religions escape the shackles of Intelligent Design, and thereby return religion to its rightful realm--not as the secular interpreter of the biological minutiae of our physical existence, but rather as a respectable philosophical counselor on grander matters of ultimate concern.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

A challenger to advocates of intelligent design, Avise is a professor of evolutionary biology who selects the human genome as the field of argument. Presenting himself as understanding where the intelligent-design community is coming from, Avise roots its ideas in a historical context of biology’s pioneers. Most, including Darwin in his youth, detected a divine hand in the living world, so in awe were they of its complex beauty. Agreeing about the complexity, Avise turns things around and wonders why the genome is so “baroque.” The multistep process of DNA replication, the supporting role of mitochondrial DNA, and DNA flaws such as disease-causing genes fall shy of an optimal design; throughout his text, Avise weighs the persuasiveness of evolution against invocation of an intelligent designer as explanations for the less-than-best shape of the genome. Readers who are familiar with the terms of molecular biology and are interested in the holdings or activities of the intelligent-design community are the best audience for Avise’s even-tempered exploration. --Gilbert Taylor

Review

"Wonderfully crafted."--The Journal of Heredity

Mention in Evolutionary Anthropology

listed in Birdbooker Report

"A wonderful trip through the workings--and non-workings!--of the human genome. The author opens the door to a view of life that is exciting for those who love science and theologically stimulating for those with religious beliefs. Everyone who cares about human nature should read this book."--Michael Ruse, Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy, Florida State University, and author of Darwinism and its Discontents

"Over millennia we have become experts in theodicy--vindicating the perfections of God despite the world's errors and evils. Having now discovered a great deal about life at and below the cellular level, we know that our genetic machinery is full of waste, mistakes, dead ends, and the molecular equivalent of evil. No intelligent designer would produce such a mess. But it works, and it is exactly what would result from genetic evolution. In this eloquent look at the human genome, distinguished evolutionary geneticist John C. Avise makes it all clear and accessible."--Paul R. Gross, co-author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design

"With characteristic insight, learning, and clarity, John Avise makes a compelling case for non-intelligent design. There is much to learn from this engrossing and profoundly original book-read on, your interest will never wane."--Francisco J. Ayala, University Professor and Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences, University of California, Irvine, and author of Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion

"Avise dares to show his readers what's really going on with our DNA...a timely and important work."--BioScience

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (February 12, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195393430
• ISBN-13: 978-0195393439
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #914,709 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John C. Avise is Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, at the University of California, Irvine. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A timely reminder that Evolution still rules supreme., February 22, 2010

By 

Wayne Robinson (Las Vegas, USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design (Kindle Edition)

Published on February 12, 2010, presumably in celebration of the 201st anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, "Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design" is yet another book convincingly pointing out that the "modern" Creationist theory of Intelligent Design has no explanatory or predictive power, and therefore fails.

I don't recommend the Kindle edition though. The formatting of the tables and illustrations is very poor, and almost completely unreadable, and after a while I gave up on them. The text is very clear though. It would have been better if it had been formatted for the larger screen of the Kindle DX or the Kindle computer version.

Instead of examining biological structures that work very well and are very beautiful, John Avise examines plain ugly and barely functional elements of ID's latest poster child, DNA. He shows that DNA looks exactly the way it should, after a long process of evolution and tinkering, and not the masterwork of a loving and caring Intelligent Designer.

It's often forgotten, that for all its design faults, the vertebrate eye still works extremely well. Both Intelligent Design and Evolution have little trouble in explaining perfection or almost perfection.

John Avise, in less than 240 pages (in the Kindle version, the main text finishes 72% through the book before the "Notes and References"), discusses exhaustively the many design faults of the human genome. I'm not certain for whom this book is written. Certainly not the common run-of-the mill ID proponent who waxes enthusiastically over Stephen Meyer's 600+ page "Signature in the Cell". The information is presented in a very dense form, fact after fact, almost without respite.

To give two examples John Avise uses. In malarial areas, sickle cell trait provides increased resistance to malaria. Individuals are heterozygous for Haemoglobin S, a variant form of Haemoglobin A, and have a survival advantage. Individuals with sickle cell anaemia, homozygous for HbS, have a nasty and short life. They pay the price for the increased survival of heterozygotes, and the die is cast at conception. Hardly the deed of a loving and caring Intelligent Designer. So, the malarial parasite is intelligently designed, and the stop-gap measure of sickle cell trait is also intelligently designed, or at least according to ID.

He also discusses my favourite example of bad design, the mitochondrial genome. Mitochondria were originally symbiotic bacteria, and as such had a complete bacterial genome. Most of the mitochondrial genes have been moved out of harm's way to the nucleus, but the mitochondria still retains a circular bacterial chromosome, with a small number of genes, including 13 genes for components of the oxidative phosphorylation pathway. In mitochondria, exposed to free radicals of oxygen, they mutate at 5 to 10 times the rate of nuclear genes, so the end result is steadily decreasing energy production with ageing, and "brownouts" followed by "blackouts", and death.

The human genome contains 3 billion base pairs. Most of it is definitely "junk", without function. ID proponents have faith that all of it will eventually be found to have a function, but they are certain to be disappointed. Almost all genes consist of alternating exons (which code for the protein product) and introns (which don't). The trouble is, is that the the non-coding introns are 30 times as long as the coding exons. So the cell has to take a lot of effort transcribing a much larger mRNA molecule than necessary, and then has to expend a lot more effort splicing the non-coding RNA out to get a functional mRNA molecule. Not very efficient, and very wasteful. Bacteria have a much more efficient genome (actually, I wonder, does the Intelligent Designer love bacteria more than us?)

Towards the end, the author points out that Darwin liberated both science and theology with "Origin of the Species". No longer do religious people have to try to explain the theodicy of genetic defects, as the action of a loving and caring Creator.

The author finishes, with a re-writing of Darwin's famous conclusion to "Origin"; "... There is grandeur in this view of the genome, with its several powers, having perhaps been originally breathed by the Creator into one or a few primordial molecular forms; and ... from so simple a beginning most beautiful, sometimes most awful, but always wondrous genomic features have been, and are being evolved".

I think I still prefer the original, which still excites me whenever I hear it.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 5 for content, 1 for formatting..., March 6, 2010

By 

A. J. Demma (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design (Kindle Edition)

The author does an excellent job of presenting evidence against Intelligent Design at the genomic level. It's a relatively short book, packed with facts. As a biologist I was fine, but it may be slightly too technical for the casual reader.

Unfortunately the Kindle formatting was atrocious. I doubt that anyone actually checked it. Only the first chapter link works on the table of contents. And none of the endnotes are clickable. Plus many of the tables are broken up by text or unreadable. I feel bad for the author to have the publisher mangle his book like this.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Much-needed book; appreciated brevity; but very difficult for non-specialists., March 3, 2010

By 

Greg "Saganite" (Brooklyn Park, Mongolia) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design (Hardcover)

Some material is irreducibly complex. I mean in genetics. There is only so far that an author can go in simplifying the material for a non-scientist like me before she ends up not even saying things that are accurate any more. So I sympathize with Avise's challenge in writing a book like this, but...I found some of his efforts to be more "popular" in his tone sort of amusing. I mean, he says that he is trying to produce a work for a "broad audience." Effort noted and appreciated, but then the next couple of chapters had between them perhaps four or five paragraphs that I could follow fully. And sometime's Avise helpfully provides a definition for a term that might not be familiar to the reader (ironically, it was more often than not these terms that I WAS familiar with...so perhaps one of his guiding principles was only to define the terms that were essential to an understanding of the overall subject matter even if in the context of other less-well-understood terms), followed by an onslaught of three or four paragraphs in a row of genetic arcana that I find it very hard to believe anyone without a solid grounding in genetics could follow.

Having said all that, I still think the book is valuable and I think it's compelling...even kind of fun in its way, because the genome and its workings are such a freak show. The chapters where Avise comes up for air and makes pronouncements on what we've just read are lucid and cogent. Avise plays painfully fair with theism, but I do wish he could have followed Jerry Coyne's example in "Why Evolution is True" and just not addressed much of the theistic stuff at all. It's not necessary to make some sort of atheistic rant or to try to make up some soothing excuses for theism either one. The science speaks for itself, quite loudly, and any dispassionate examination of the evidence can only lead one to conclude that an all-powerful, all-good being cannot be behind the human genome. As Avise says in the section on mitochondria, not only is the design of it suboptimal, it is ludicrous. 'Nuff said, frankly. Efforts at reconciliation with religion seem necessarily hollow once the truth of that sinks in.

There are other books that walk a similar path and are much easier to read. I'm thinking especially of Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease, which has an interesting take on, for example, malaria. But for sophisticated, scientifically credible material one could use to counter the work of, for example, some recent books that try to make the claim that Intelligent Design is evident in DNA, "Inside" is invaluable. Not light reading, mind you, but invaluable.