DNA unraveled - Boston Globe article

This is a fantastic article. (may require registration to read).  I have contended in my posts on Intelligent Design that science will continue to uncover more and more complexity making it continually more difficult to explain how Darwinian evolution can possibly account for the intricate complexity.  This article details how over the past few years, scientist's understanding of how DNA and RNA work reveal mind boggling levels of complex order and wonder.

"Science is just starting to probe the wilderness between genes," said John M. Greally, molecular biologist at New York's Albert Einstein School of Medicine. "Already we're surprised and confounded by a lot of what we're seeing."

...lots of basic biological beliefs are going out the window these days as new discoveries come so rapid-fire that the effect is almost more disorienting than illuminating.

Scientist who KNOW how things happened are disoriented?  Come on, they know!!  Don't they?  No they don't.  But they know this, nothing supernatural, certainly not a GOD could have possibly had anything to do with it.  It just could not be and we KNOW it!!  Our definition of "science" says so.

Of great interest to me is the realization that genes are not necessarily all they are cracked up to be.  Evolution says that everything we see is basically a result of darwinian random genetic mutations.  It turns out that there is so much more going on with DNA that does not involve genes at all.

"It's a radical concept, one that a lot of scientists aren't very happy with," said Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. "But the scientific community is going to have to rethink what genes are, what they do and don't do, and how the genome's functional elements have evolved.  -  genes were assigned an almost divine role in biological "dogma," thought to govern not only such physical characteristics as eye color or hair texture, but even much more complicated characteristics, such as behavior or psychology.

Altshuler led a team that earlier this year discovered that a common form of diabetes is triggered by changes occurring in sections of DNA hitherto regarded as junk - that is, occupying space on the genome but regarded as having no particular function.

Neither Altshuler nor his co-researchers fully understand the mechanisms involved, but their work revealed that risks for Type 2 diabetes entail more than a mutated gene. Instead, diabetes - as well as heart disease, some cancers, and other deadly ailments - appear to involve processes occurring in noncoding DNA regions as well as in genes.

Such findings represent a sea change for a science that has typically put genes at the center of the universe, much as ancient astronomers believed sun and stars revolved around the earth.

"We're realizing that things happening 'somewhere else' in the genome, not in genes, are playing critical roles" in sickness and in health, Altshuler said.

Wait a minute.  If it is not genes that are mutating and somehow producing new protein machinery, how did evolution produce this complexity?  I am sure my evolutionist friends can suggest how it "maybe coulda" but that is conjecture and not science.

biological dogma has held that organisms - whether human or hydrangea - are largely controlled by a tidy collection of independent genes...These days, RNA is emerging as a superstar, a prime mover and shaker in cellular processes hitherto attributed mainly to genes.

I love it when a reporter calls it "dogma".  That is what it is. Evolutionists hypothesize how something "could" happen.  Then declare that is how it "did" happen.  Later, new data is discovered showing it could not have happened according to their dogma.  They don't like it when that happens.

"The picture that's emerging" of how living cells actually operate and evolve "is so immensely more complicated than anyone imagined, it's almost depressing," Rigoutsos said.

Why depressing??  Why not incredibly awe inspiring and exciting?  Somebody really intelligent designed this sucker!  NOPE.  It can't be that!  It just can't.  No intelligent design can be inferred from obvious intelligence!!  "It does not fit our definition of science damnit!"

Rigoutsos published startling research last year that pegged the number of different RNAs performing some sort of labor in cells at about 37,000...  But few had predicted the complex orchestration of genes and nongenetic DNA suggested by the Encode research.

Think about that.  37,000 living, replicating, protein machines, all being "orchestrated" in an incredibly intelligent way for the PURPOSE of producing and maintaining life.  All intricately and intelligently working together inside a cell, naked to the eye.  And we are to believe these 37,000 intricate, complex machines simply just happened.  How lucky is that?? 

Reasonable people can readily infer a supernatural intelligence behind it all.  That is the essence of the Intelligent Design revolution.  A small band of legitimate scientists coming to a contrarian conclusion that random darwinian processes simply cannot explain such elegant, complex intelligence.  Something that appears designed, is virtually always designed.  It is highly logical.  Unless you don't like the inference. 

The article concludes

However none dispute that biology is at an extraordinary pivotal point - one in which the pace of discovery seems faster than the ability of even the most brilliant minds in the field to comprehend.

How is that our most brilliant minds cannot comprehend what is actually going on inside of a cell/organ/body and yet they KNOW it happened by a random process?  Incomprehensible but we know how it happened.  There is no God.  There is no designer because by definition there simply cannot be one.  We don't want one.  Anyone who suggests different is an IDiot!!  "Ignore the man behind behind the curtain."  What a great article.  Well done Boston Globe and Colin Nickerson.