How Can Evolution Shape Genomes When Key Traits are not Inheritable, and Larger Questions

This article describes an amazing study done with fruit flies. It turns out that what could be a very important behavioral trait - whether when walking to a goal they travel directly there or meander - is not an inheritable trait. It is the result of non-inheritable "static" during development. 

Flies don't have much "personality" but to the extent they do, how they move toward a goal is a big part of it. Humans vary in traits like this too, and the implications of the study were that many aspects of personality were not heritable. In some traits we are often like our parents. The debate has always been how much was nature and how much was nurture? But isn't it also true that many times siblings have very different personalities?

I think the folks reporting on the study may go too far in applying it to humans when they say that important personality traits in humans may not be inherited. We are more complicated than fruit flies. But right now it sure seems like things which are potentially very important for survival and reproduction come from what look like to us random processes. 

How is evolution supposed to be the dominant factor in shaping genomes when non-heritable traits have such importance? Suppose a new allele in one of 20,000 genes was by some chance twice as good as any existing allele as far as helping a species survive in a given environment. That would be a vast improvement, improbable enough as it is. But it is also just one of 20,000 genes and so being twice as good in one part out of twenty-thousand in the genome wouldn't confer much of a survival advantage. Maybe some other gene has a mildly deleterious allele, cancelling out the advantage. Maybe the creature gets eaten by a hawk by bad luck and the advantage goes away. The math was always dubious unless the new advantage was incredibly large. So the idea that environmental pressures combined with chance mutation was hard to accept as the sole force which turned amoebas into men and explained all the diversity we see in earth's living things.

Now we learn that once creatures get advanced enough to have anything resembling "personality", that major aspects of their behavior are not inherited. It seems to me that in the more advanced animals, where behavior plays such a big role, that personality would be a huge factor deciding who survives and reproduces and who does not. If its not heritable, evolution can't work the way its advocates have said that it does.

Look, I have written a book about Early Genesis. It is not even an "anti-evolution" book. Nor is it a "pro-evolution" book. It is a book about how even Genesis points to the work and person of Christ. Obviously, this could not be so absent a miracle. But we have a miracle. And this miracle in the text, so clear once you do the work to see it, deserves a lot more consideration than the creation-evolution debate whose noise is drowning out so much else.

The argument over the extent to which nature alone is responsible for life's diversity is very divisive. There is an extremist Theistic position which says that all species were specially created by God. There is an extremist Naturalistic position which says that nature alone is fully responsible and no help from outside nature is needed. I think most Christians have come around somewhat to the middle, but naturalists and some Christians have maintained an implacable resistance to even considering the idea that nature must have had help. And indeed this is what Genesis one describes with respect to living creatures- God commanded the waters and the seas to bring them forth but then the text subsequently says that He had to make them somehow. The text describes God helping nature fulfill His command for it, just as He helps us fulfill His commands to us - something which we cannot do in our own strength.

We can meet in the middle, and not out of unprincipled compromise but out of respect for the evidence as much as each other. But we don't even have to wait for that to pursue the higher questions of whether the text is indeed Divinely inspired or simply the natural work of men wholly within nature itself. I have come to see that if we answer this question correctly then our other disputes will fade into insignificance. If we continue to put the creation-evolution question first then we will never come to terms on either question.

I maintain that the way the text of early Genesis resolves so beautifully (with scripture, nature and history) when viewed through the lens of Christ makes a compelling case for all but the most unreasonable and unwilling minds that Divine Inspiration is the most rational explanation for the results. 

Unfortunately we all tend to over-estimate our own objectivity. Most of us believe we are rational, but scripture teaches that we are all bound by sin, and sin is anything but rational. So I would say the proper order of approach to know truth about scripture is to first accept the truth about who we are (necessary for changing for the better), and then consider the truth about what the text really says (Christ says it is about Him in John 5:46 et al), and only lastly what that means about the natural world.

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