I am not a geneticist. I have not studied genetics extensively. But I have been fascinated by some overviews of the latest finds in mapping the human genome. It appears that things are not always as they appear.
I’ve heard that human beings share roughly 50% of our genes with bananas. That we share roughly 70% of our genes with flatworms. And in the upper 90% range with apes.
You could argue that this is a blueprint of evolution. That as things got more and more complex, we began to see them get more and more refined. Genetic code could be see as evolution in action.
But I have a different perspective. I am not an evolution-denier, just an evolution-skeptic. I’d be more vocal about it if I wasn’t so apathetic about the issue.
What I am seeing when I hear that we share genes in a similar manner to bananas and flatworms is that genetics is a kind of object-oriented program language. In other words, there are base class definitions that we share with all forms of life on the planet written is strands of proteins rather than ones and zeroes.
So what I am seeing, as a professional software developer, is that life has a base code or base class definition that all life on Earth shares. There is a root definition from which all forms of life inherit. Once you understand that, you begin to see a purposeful process in the genetic code.
Then you apply principles like polymorphism, which becomes more complex with more and more class definitions being applied, you begin to see how life can be so diverse and yet have so much genetic code in common.
On top of that, we see properties which are defined differently depending on the class of life we are dealing with. Male and Female is a good example of a Boolean (true/false) property. I could go on from here. But the genetic code seems to indicate a purpose collection of properties, mostly inherited, and a collection of data to fit each property. The final object is the existence of a life form of some kind.
This raises deeper questions though. If genetics is purposeful, if it is indeed some high-level form of software encoded in protein strains, then was there a hand behind it to map it out and create a chart of some kind to indicate all the properties and definitions of each life-form class?
Software development is not a spontaneous process. Even in the worst of cases, there is still some purposeful design behind it. So if it is not a spontaneous process, then is there a prime developer behind it all. Was it a team of developers?
As a Christian, I see the genetic code as quite possibly God’s Word being given material substance. He spoke and it came into being. Or rather, he coded and it was created.
I don’t have all the answers though. I never will. But it seems to me that genetics proves that there was some kind of intelligent design to life.
More inquiries are needed though. And like I said, I am not a geneticists by trade, merely a software developer with an interesting perspective on all of this.