Was Lamarck Right? Squid Edit Their RNA Outside Nucleus

Jean Baptiste Lamarck was the first to outline a coherent theory of evolution, though not the one accepted today. He didn't know about genes. He thought there was some material force in the universe, like electromagnetism, which drove life to increasing complexity. He called this a "complexifying force". But his second major thesis is the one he was most known for: that animals can prompt biological changes in themselves by the use or disuse of a function. There was, he proposed. an additional "adaptive force." In his mind this change would then be hereditary.

Well, it turns out squid edit their own RNA. Their DNA can say one thing, but the messenger RNA can be altered, outside the cell nucleus, to make different proteins. I don't think there is any evidence such changes would be heritable, but it does speak to Lamarck's second thesis within the life of an animal.

What it also does, is make biological evolution to any great extent even more unlikely. Very much like the fly study on epigenetic changes I recently wrote about, this represents another way an organism can adapt to its environment without passing down heritable changes to its offspring. In other words, squid can adapt within a range without having to genetically evolve. It in fact relieves the pressure to genetically evolve. If a particular protein is needed, it can be edited into existence without changing the DNA.

Are the edited proteins "intelligently designed". Well, a squid is not much for intelligence. I think it would be better to think of the squid as an end-user of its own RNA editing software, which would seem intelligently designed.

So in spite of my provocative headline, it still seems Lamarck was more wrong that right. There is no scientific evidence for the existence of his "complexifying force" operating on the earth today. Creationists and some Theistic Evolutionists would say that such a "force" operated in the past, but it wasn't a material or natural force. Rather it was the hand of God aiding the earth and seas as they obeyed His command to "bring forth living creatures". His "adaptive force" has been mostly rejected by science once we learned about heritable DNA, but maybe it needs another look. He may have been right about the ability of an organism to self-edit, but wrong about the heritability of those edits.

These two studies together, along with a lot of other evidence, point to the idea that types of organisms have a certain range of built in adaptability, much of which is not in the long run heritable and does not require any changes in DNA. So for example a squid with a genetic mutation to produce a new protein would have no evolutionary advantage over a squid who can edit that protein into existence anyway if it is needed. The mutation may even be a disadvantage because it is unclear if the mutated DNA can be edited back to produce the original protein. How is macro-evolution, rather than just variation around a mean, supposed to occur if vast swaths of adaptability are not even inheritable, but rather environmental responses?

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 Note: the book is mostly about the miraculous presence of repeated references to Christ and His work in early Genesis rather than the "creation-evolution wars", which it mostly soars above.

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