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God and the Geneticists
| Article
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12132 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1987 |
984 Words |
| Author
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Peter Brian Medawar
Peter Brian Medawar, who died in early October, was a
biochemist and immunologist who won the Nobel Prize in
physiology or medicine in 1960 for discoveries dealing with
the prevention of tissue implant rejection. He will be
remembered equally for his outstanding contributions to
science writing, evidenced in collections of essays such as
Advice to a Young Scientist (1979) and Pluto's Republic
(1982). |
Not so very many years ago people talked about "God and the physicists"--and the names of James Jeans and A.S. Eddington come at once to mind--but today the geneticists have elbowed their way to the footlights and a great change has come about in relations between science and religion: the physicists were in the main very well disposed towards God, but the geneticists are not.
It is upon the notion of randomness that geneticists have based their case against a benevolent or malevolent deity and against there being any overall purpose or design in nature.
Randomness enters into the genetic process at two levels: firstly in the entirely random process of mutation, which plays an important part in providing a candidature for evolutionary change, and secondly in the random allocation of chromosomes to germ cells and the random pairing of germ cells to form a fertilized egg. Indeed, the simple segregation ratios that represent the numbers of offspring of each genetic type expected according to mendelian rules are quite widely used to illustrate the practical applications of probability theory. It is like a vast lottery in which booby prizes are more obtrusive than rewards. If two parents are both carriers of that deleterious recessive gene which, when inherited from both parents, causes phenylketonuria, then we can pretty confidently say that on the average one quarter of their children will be victims of phenylketonuria, an "inborn error of metabolism" that may lead to serious mental retardation.
It is not quite good enough to dismiss this unhappy conjunction of deleterious genes as "bad luck" in the sense in which such a description might be thought to apply to a young parent's being killed by a falling roof tile.
The difference is that a parent's being killed by a falling roof tile presents only the casual and in general terms unforeseeable intersection of two otherwise unconnected trains of events, whereas the randomness that enters into genetic mutation and segregation is an integral and essential part of the genetic process, something provided for by the genetic mechanisms themselves. The randomness and the calamities that may go with it are "laid on" rather than casual.
A disputant intent upon defending the Argument from Design might at this stage declare that the entire genetic system showed clear evidence of design in the way in which Nature provides for and takes advantage of the random element in the genetic process. This
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