The only nerve Jonathan Wells is hitting is my ulnar nerve

(For those without a detailed knowledge of anatomy, the ulnar nerve is the one struck when someone hits their “funny bone”. Ohoho, I’m so hilarious.)

Oh Casey Luskin, what would the Internet do without you? It’s people like you, Denyse O’Leary and Cornelius Hunter that constantly remind the online evolution community how vigilant they need to be – if we don’t get on our game, things like this intriguing post on Evolution News & Views get by unchecked.

In “Jonathan Wells Hits an Evolutionary Nerve”, Casey tries to defend Jonathan Wells’s recent claims about gene duplication and the apparent lack of any kind of mechanism for increasing the information content in genomes – a major part of the overall history of evolutionary change. The reason for this is clear, Casey uses the other fellows at the Discovery Institute to continually prop up his own position – without them, his arguments would be void of any substance, scientifically valid or not.

What does Jonathan have to say on the topic of gene duplication? Let’s examine the analogy he uses to explain it, the one that Casey finds so alluring:

The questioner became agitated and shouted out something to the effect that HOX gene duplication explained the increase in information needed for the diversification of animal body plans. I replied that duplicating a gene doesn’t increase information content any more than photocopying a paper increases its information content.

Casey goes into explain it in a little more detail, but he uses weird Information Theory language that I, quite frankly, don’t understand. The thing is though, I don’t need to understand it, nothing he could say could ever add any more plausibility to his strawman argument. Why is it a strawman? Let’s find out.

Gene duplication really is like a copying a piece of paper, at a basic level. With both processes you’ve added an extra copy of something, be it a sequence of letters on a page or a sequence of nucleotides in the genome. So far, so good. At this level, Casey would be nodding his head, thinking “I told you it wasn’t a false analogy, I told you!” Yeah, yeah, hang on, we haven’t finished yet. Who claimed it was a false analogy? When you duplicate a gene, you have two potential expression sites for proteins – the analogy with paper would mirror that by saying that when you duplicate a piece of paper, you have two potential sites for people to read off them. The analogy once again accurately extends further.

At this point, if that was all evolutionary biologists were claiming about gene duplication, Jonathan and Casey would be correct – no new information has really been added to the genome, all you have is two copies of something. But, like most things said by creationists and intelligent design proponents on the topic of evolution, that’s not the whole picture.

Now, I’m in no way claiming that ID-proponents are unintelligent (as Casey would like you to think that I am), but I’m going to explain this simply, using the paper analogy, so that everyone, including confused Discovery Institute fellows, can understand perfectly.

So, you have the photocopy of the paper and the original paper. These represent the duplicate gene and the original gene. So far, you have exactly the same amount of information as you did before. But what happens when you cross out a word and put in a different one in its place? Suddenly, you don’t have two copies of the same paper anymore – you have two different papers. Each can now be read and a different piece of information can be received from each one – and one of those pieces of information is completely new.

Removing the analogy for a moment, what just happened was a point mutation -  a nucleotide that comprises a small part of the duplicated gene was changed. What makes papers and genes different on this level is the fact that on paper you need to change a word to another English word in order for the resultant paper to make any sense (in English), but in the language of genetics, any changed gene is still translated the same way (to a basic extent), so if you delete, add or alter a nucleotide you’ll still get a protein, just not one that may have any function at the moment.

Haha, but I suppose, looking at it another way, the analogy does match up – having a “point mutation” on the paper yields a nonsense word, just like a point mutation in a gene produces a nonsense protein. However, both of the products of the chance could become used at a later date: the new word could become a neologism, and the new protein could catalyse some new chemical in the environment or just have a slightly different function to its ancestor gene.

So, to claim that duplicating a gene doesn’t increase the information content of the genome is correct, but it’s a strawman argument to say that evolutionary biologists think that it does. No evolutionary biologist does (or should, if they do) claim that.

Jonathan Wells and Casey Luskin, you amazingly brilliant men – you’ve just strengthened the public understanding of gene duplication via your paper analogy! I bow down to you. Now I just hope that you’ll properly explain it to everyone – you seemed to miss a lot of vital information in your current explanation. But I’ve sorted all it out for you, so you’ll link to me, right, guys? Guys? Hello?

But… I didn’t insult you or anything. I went against the supposed “Darwinist” stereotype! Dammit, you just can’t win.