Loose genes

In the course of writing Skeptophilia for nearly fifteen years, I thought I'd run into every purveyor of woo out there.

I was wrong.

Somehow, I missed a guy named Gregg Braden, but that error on my part was rectified by a long-time follower, who sent me a link to a YouTube video with the message, "Fasten your seatbelt."

What I needed, as it turns out, was not a seatbelt, but a pillow to cushion my forehead from the repeated faceplants I did while watching it.  The video is a conversation between Braden and a woman called Theresa Bullard-Whyke of "Quantum Minds TV" that should win some kind of award for the Most Skillful Blend of Scientific Half-Truths With Complete Bullshit Ever Produced.

To take just one example, Braden and Bullard-Whyke describe a phenomenon called DNA packing, which is a well-studied feature of our genetic material.  It's been estimated that each of us has enough DNA that if it were stretched out end to end, it would measure a hundred trillion meters -- about three hundred times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.  So to put it mildly, the stuff has to be wrapped pretty tightly.  There are a number of ways this is accomplished, but one of the main ones is that the DNA spools around a protein complex called histone, which assembles into a lattice that forms the scaffolding of our chromosomes.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons OpenStax, 0321 DNA Macrostructure, CC BY 4.0]

Braden then goes into how this is one of the ways we control gene expression.  We have an estimated twenty thousand protein-encoding genes in our genome (depending on exactly how you define the term, and whether you include sequences that up-regulate or down-regulate other genes), but less than one percent of them are active in any particular tissue at a given time.  When DNA is tightly coiled up into what is called heterochromatin, it is effectively inactivated; the enzymes required for transcribing it into mRNA (the first step of protein production) simply can't get at it.  Ergo: the genes in that region are shut off.

So far, so good.

But then Braden and Bullard-Whyke take that information, and run right off the cliff with it.

Braden seems to think this gene shutoff is a bad thing, and that we'd have "superpowers" (yes, he used that word) if we could somehow get all those closed-down genes to turn back on again.  The reality, of course, is that in a healthy human, those switched-off genes are switched off for a reason; a lot of them are developmental genes that spur rapid cell division and are critical during early organ formation in embryos, but if turned back on would trigger cancer.  (Some oncogenes -- cancer-promoting genes -- do their dirty work more or less by this mechanism.)

Then Braden goes into an inadvertently hilarious claim that positive emotions cause your DNA to relax, and negative ones make it tighten up.  Experience positive emotions, he says, and your DNA will get all loosey-goosey and more of your genes will turn on.  Negative emotions makes the DNA "get knotted up," and genes turn off.  "It's influenced by your breath," he says.

Then he enthusiastically launched into describing an alleged experiment where some scientists (unnamed, of course) found that if you have photons in a vacuum, they are all random, but if you introduce DNA into the vacuum, they "all become aligned."  "This experiment conclusively proves," Bullard-Whyke said, somehow maintaining a straight face the entire time, "that DNA informs the quantum vacuum."

Well, as someone who is reasonably conversant both in biology and in physics, allow me simply to say that of all the things in the history of the universe that never happened, this experiment is the one that never happened the most.

But that didn't stop Braden and Bullard-Whyke, who went on to make the highly logical argument that if (1) your emotions can turn on your DNA, and (2) DNA informs the photons in the quantum vacuum (whatever the fuck that even means), then (3) what you experience might activate not only your own DNA, but that of people around you.

"When we live in fear," Braden says, "we're tightening our chromatin, and it influences the gene expression not only in ourselves, but in those we come into contact with."

So I hereby wish to issue an apology to anyone who has had to deal with me when I was in a bad mood, and who experienced massive gene shut-down as a result.  I will definitely try to improve how my biophotons are informing the quantum vacuum in the future.

What completely destroyed what little faith I have left in humanity's intellectual potential, though, was when I looked at the comments section for the video, and found stuff like this:

• Once again, Gregg, you have gone above and beyond expectations in your discoveries and studies with our Humanity and Universe and how it is all connected within us.  We are definitely in a beautiful shift as human beings.  Thank you for all that you do and teach.
• Outstanding content!  The evolved healers shomons [sic] high level alchemy and the new yet the ancient!  The connection between heart and brain and the conductor to everything else in the field!
• The most awaited golden age is almost here meaning the light is turning off for humanity so that we can have access to our true self in this dimension & beyond!  This is the time to care over being scare [sic]!
• Yes, I know this to be true - and all the creation stories are true, and not myth as we have believed.  I have known this for years.  And now Gregg Braden has presented the scientific proof.
• Apparently we can manifest our physical reality out of thin air, that's what I want to learn and unlock.  Highly evolved beings throughout the universe can connect with the field that makes up the universe and travel great distances in the blink of an eye and manifest creations from thought through the field into physical being in an instant.  If they can do it, the message I'm receiving is that we can too.  Can someone please figure this out and make tutorial videos?

Yes, please do make some tutorials!  I'll bring the snacks and a bottle of scotch.  First person who teleports a great distance in the blink of an eye wins.

Oh, and I should mention that while looking into this guy, I found out he was recently on The Joe Rogan Experience (because of course he was), wherein he claimed that NASA is covering up evidence of a fifty-thousand-year-old human civilization on the Moon.  He also apparently has written a book about how the name of God and the periodic table are both somehow encoded in the nucleotide sequence of our DNA.

So.  Yeah.  I don't know how I missed Gregg Braden, but he definitely is right up there with David Icke, Diane Tessman, and Richard C. Hoagland in the "I Make Up For In Confidence What I Lack In Accuracy" department.  But for those of us in the studio audience, can I once again urge you to look into what the actual scientists are saying on a topic before you fall for people like this?  I mean, if you're not up to reading technical journal articles on the topic -- which, let's face it, most of us aren't -- at least peruse the fucking Wikipedia page, okay?

Because seeing people praising this guy is making my photons go all higgledy-piggledy, and it's gonna shut all my wife's genes off.  She gets really cranky when that happens.

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Holy genome, Batman!

A couple of days ago, a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me an email that said, "You think you know genetics, Mr. Smarty Pants?  Get a load of this."

He included a link to a site called Gostica: The Spiritual Path, in particular a post called "The Scientists Are Shocked: First Scientific Proof of God Found."  And in it, we hear that passages from the bible have shown up...

...in the genetic code.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christoph Bock, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, DNA methylation, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I'm not making this up.  I would strongly recommend your taking a look at the actual site, but not while you're drinking anything, because I will not be responsible for coffee sprayed all over your computer screen.

The fun starts, in fact, with the very first phrase of the first sentence: "Linguistic professors at Bob Jones University, long noted for its intellectual rigor..."

Intellectual rigor?  The school that has been nicknamed "The Buckle on the Bible Belt?"  The school whose biology program description states, "One of the benefits of studying biology at BJU is that you’ll get a top-notch science education from a thoroughly Christian perspective.  In addition to strengthening your faith in the reliability of the Bible, this perspective will also help prepare you to understand modern secular interpretations of science and apply a biblical worldview to them."?

The school whose behavior code explicitly forbids its students to wear denim skirts, have "fauxhawks," access an "unfiltered internet," or listen to "Rock, Pop, Country, Jazz, Electronic/ Techno, Rap/Hip Hop or the fusion of any of these genres"?

And in any case, who the hell wears denim skirts anymore?

But I digress.

So the "intellectually rigorous scientists" from Bob Jones University started looking at pieces of DNA, including "transposons and retrotransposons" (Ooh!  Big words!), and this is what they found:

[They] began to attempt to translate the decoded segments that W.I.T. was providing.  The structure was notably and demonstrably human in nature.  The coding language found, which utilized sequences of twenty-eight independent values, fell easily into the incidence range of known alphabets.  Sequences of independent connected values likewise mirrored the structure of word composition in human languages.  The Linguistic and Philology team at Bob Jones began an extensive comparison of the quizzical script found in the “Junk DNA” with the catalog of every recorded human language; hoping to find similar lingual threads so that they could begin to formulate translations of the message laying hidden in the DNA.  Professors were rocked with sheer awe when they found that one existent language, and one language alone, was a direct translatable match for the sequential DNA strands.

And guess what that language was, and what it said? You'll never guess.

The Language in the “Junk DNA”, the DNA that scientists had for years discarded as useless, was indistinguishable from ancient Aramaic.  Even more amazingly, as linguists started to translate the code within the human genome, they found that parts of the script it contained were at times remarkably close in composition to verse found in the Bible.  And at times contained direct biblical quotes. 

On the human gene PYGB, Phosporomylase Glycogen, a non-coding transposon, holds a linguistic sequence that translates as “At first break of day, God formed sky and land.”  This bears a stunning similarity to Gen 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  Gene Bmp3 has a Retrotransposon sequence which translates to the well-known 1 Cor 6:19 “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?  You are not your own.”  This is repeated over and over throughout the entire sequence of human DNA: embedded equivalent genetic code of ancient Aramaic that seems to translate as the word of God to his people.

Righty-o. Where do I start?

The first problem with this is that the "language" of DNA is composed of four letters (nitrogenous bases), A (adenine), G (guanine), C (cytosine), and T (thymine). So if that was the actual language of God, he'd be pretty much limited to saying stuff like "ACT TAG CAT GAG GAG GAG," although to my ears that sounds more like a pronouncement from Bill the Cat than it does like something the Divine Creator might say.  In any case, it's not really possible to spell out English using the DNA alphabet, much less ancient Aramaic.  Even if you make the allowance that maybe the "linguists" were using some kind of correspondence between the letters in Aramaic and the amino acid sequence coded for by a gene, you still only have twenty letters, not 28 as the article claims.

So what the amazingly rigorous researchers at BJU seem good at is making shit up and then lying to the media about it.  But this didn't stop them from shouting their findings from the rooftops:

Matthew Boulder, chief linguist for the project and professor of applied creation sciences at Bob Jones University, issued this statement: “As for the evidence- it is there and it is, to my view, undeniable.  The very word of God, elegantly weaved in and out of our very bodies and souls, as plain as day.  And the beauty of it, that God would lay down the words of truth in our very beings, shows his love and The Miracle.”

"Professor of applied creation science." Which is right up there with "Professor of applied unicornology" in terms of scientific validity.

So to the reader who sent me the link, all I can say is thanks.  I did read the whole thing, and also the internal links that went to the BJU "research," so you can't say I didn't give it my all.  Throughout I was torn between guffawing and slamming my forehead repeatedly against my computer keyboard.  I hope that's the reaction you wanted.  But I do wonder what my own personal DNA spells out.  Maybe a passage from The Origin of Species, you think?

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Back when I taught Environmental Science, I used to spend at least one period addressing something that I saw as a gigantic hole in students' knowledge of their own world: where the common stuff in their lives came from.  Take an everyday object -- like a sink.  What metals are the faucet, handles, and fittings made of?  Where did those metals come from, and how are they refined?  What about the ceramic of the bowl, the pigments in the enamel on the surface, the flexible plastic of the washers?  All of those substances came from somewhere -- and took a long road to get where they ended up.

Along those same lines, there are a lot of questions about those same substances that never occur to us.  Why is the elastic of a rubber band stretchy?  Why is glass transparent?  Why is a polished metal surface reflective, but a polished wooden surface isn't?  Why does the rubber on the soles of your running shoes grip -- but the grip worsens when they're wet, and vanishes entirely when you step on ice?

If you're interested in these and other questions, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for you.  In Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World, materials scientist Mark Miodownik takes a close look at the stuff that makes up our everyday lives, and explains why each substance we encounter has the characteristics it has.  So if you've ever wondered why duct tape makes things stick together and WD-40 makes them come apart, you've got to read Miodownik's book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

On the universal genetic code, glow kitties, and human/alien hybrids

One of the most powerful pieces of evidence of our common ancestry with every other life form on Earth is that we all read the genetic code the same way.  The RNA codon chart, the work of such giants in the field of genetics as Marshall Nierenberg, Francis Crick, and James Watson, works equally well for every species from bacterium to petunia to wolf spider to human.  It's the basis of genetic engineering; you can take an embryo of a cat, and insert a gene from a jellyfish that in the jellyfish produces a phosphorescent protein, and with luck and skill you will end up with...

... The GlowCats from Hell.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The cats' genetic decoding mechanisms read the DNA in exactly the same way as the jellyfish did, and therefore assemble the glow-in-the-dark protein in precisely the same way.  Put simply, every organism on Earth speaks the same genetic language.

It's why, as I was discussing with some students just yesterday, Mr. Spock is vastly improbable.  That a DNA-based life form could arise on another planet is entirely plausible; the building blocks of DNA, called nucleotides, are apparently rather easy to produce abiotically.  But the likelihood that the decoding protocol would have evolved precisely the same way on Vulcan as it did on Earth, and therefore result in two species that can interbreed, is about as close to impossible as anything I can think of.  So however tantalizing a plot element it was to have the tortured, half-emotional and half-stoic First Officer struggling to control his human side with logic, it's much more likely to be a simple biological impossibility.

If the extraterrestrials even turn out to be humanoid, and have the right... um... equipment to engage in some hot alien/human bow-chicka-bow-wow in the first place.

Interestingly enough, given the morning's rather odd topic of conversation, that yesterday afternoon I ran into a website that claims that not only are human and alien DNA compatible, but that we are hybrids already.  Well, at least some of us are.  Frankly,  it's a little hard to tell what exactly the writer is claiming:

Civilizations from parallel realities and parallel dimensions similar to our own reality have been manipulating human DNA from the beginning of our recorded history and it is highly likely that all of this activity over the decades is the visually elusive air traffic of beings involved in one singularly focused mission involving humans.  This genetic program is a part of our human history,  it is here with you and I now and will continue flowing down line into humanities future.  It is time to accept the fact that we are hybridized humanoid beings with alien DNA.

The problem is, human DNA is pretty much like the DNA of any other terrestrial species, as I mentioned earlier.  There's nothing alien about it.  But this doesn't stop the owner of the website, The Hybrids Project, from claiming that we're somehow... different.  And getting more different all the time:

Hybridization of a conscious humanoid appears to be quite complex. Evolution is not ruled out, but there is a point at which highly advanced humanoids begin to upgrade other humanoids. The benefits of this process would, at its simplest, be the perpetuation of life, intelligence and consciousness. This is a logical expectation within an infinite multiverse and likely a process that spans countless worlds and vast expanses of time as we know it. Earth is but a part of the process and not the process itself. We will come to realize that we are part of a larger galactic family and the relatives are coming to introduce themselves.

I have to admit that we certainly could use an upgrade, given some of the behavior we like to engage in.  But the kind of thing that this website goes on to describe isn't, as far as I can tell, much of an improvement.  The alien species he describes are all a little... sketchy.  We have the Tall Grays and the Short Grays, who differ only in size and otherwise are your typical bald, skinny gray aliens with enormous black eyes.  Then there are the Tall Whites, which are bald, skinny white aliens with enormous blue eyes.  None of these, frankly, are my type.  I'll stick with plain old Earth women, thanks.

At least a bit more appealing are the Tall Blonds, the male version of which looks a little like Orlando Bloom.  But then, finally, we have the Mantid Beings, which are just horrifying.  The idea of a human/mantid hybrid would imply that there was some way for a human to have sex with what amounts to a giant grasshopper, a mental image which I really didn't need to have bouncing around in my skull.  (And about my decision to pass it along to you: "You're welcome.")

By the way, if you're curious to see what any of these things look like, I encourage you to peruse the website, which is chock-full of artists' depictions and is really highly entertaining.

Also on the website are all sorts of descriptions of abduction experiences, in which Earthlings were captured and brought on board ship and examined, probed, and worse by various members of these alien species.  The hybrid children thus produced, the website tells us, "are quite different and far more advanced than you and I and thus are currently living off world out of harm's way."  Which is pretty convenient.  All of the kids I see on a day-to-day basis seem like regular old people to me.  None of them have gray skin or black eyes or look like Orlando Bloom or a giant praying mantis.

Fortunately.

So, anyway.  As much as I love the idea of extraterrestrial life, the tales of abduction and hybridization and so on seem to me to be not only delusional, but biological impossibilities.  Much as some people don't like the idea, Homo sapiens forms nothing more than a tiny little blip in a continuum with other terrestrial life forms -- any interesting features we have, like our (relatively) large brains, are perfectly well explained by the evolution and genetics we already understand.

Which, in some ways, is too bad.  Mr. Spock was kind of cool.  And if I'm wrong, let me just mention to any alien life forms who might be looking in my direction; I'm already spoken for.

The alien genetic code, and the hazards of overconclusion

One type of scientific error I find my students frequently make is "overconclusion."  This is when you take data that supports a specific conclusion, and draw from it a far more general conclusion than is warranted.  As a simple example, if you have found that marigolds produce more flowers when given a high-nitrogen fertilizer, it is an overconclusion to claim that all plants will react that way.

Woo-woos, I find, are especially prone to this -- many "alternative medicine" therapies are good examples.  Acupuncture is reported by a friend of yours to have had success in reducing his pain from an injury, so you conclude that it must be good for everyone, regardless of the source of the pain, and also useful in treating everything from angina to warts.  Lycopene, an antioxidant found in tomatoes, is reported in some studies to reduce the incidence of cancer, so all antioxidants are cancer preventatives -- or cancer cures.  And so on.

The problem gets worse when the original data comes from a realm that hardly anyone really understands.  And I found an excellent example of that just yesterday, in a pair of articles -- one which uses an abstruse method on an unfamiliar data set to support a rather wild conclusion, and a second one that takes that conclusion and runs right off the cliff with it.

The first one, which was published on April Fool's Day but appears to be legitimate, is called "Is An Alien Message Embedded in Our Genetic Code?"  It describes the research of two Kazakh geneticists, Vladimir I. shCherbak and Maxim A. Makukov, who claim to have found in the human genome a "mathematical and semantic signal" that indicates the storage of non-functionally-based (i.e. not evolutionarily derived) information in our DNA.  "Simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language," they wrote in the journal Icarus.  "Accurate and systematic, these underlying patterns appear as a product of precision logic and nontrivial computing."  This, they conclude, is because we are the product of panspermia -- our genetic code originated elsewhere in the universe, and this is the signature of the alien species that seeded our DNA here.

My first thought: wasn't that the whole idea behind the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase?"

Definitely one of the best episodes -- but I was under the impression that the entire series was fiction, weren't you?

Now, other than that, I am drastically unqualified to comment upon whether the scientists have really stumbled upon something astonishing.  This is despite my training in evolutionary genetics -- which, you would think, would be enough.  In order to determine if shCherbak and Makukov have actually found evidence of life's extraterrestrial origins, you have to be able to show, mathematically, that an apparent encoded signal is meaningful.  This is decidedly non-trivial.  As I've commented before, given a sufficiently long string of characters, you can always pull a meaningful pattern out as long as you mess about with it long enough and are willing to change the rules as you go (see my post on the alleged "Bible Code" here).  And three billion base pairs is a helluva long string.

So, the bottom line is: unless you are an expert in information theory and mathematics, you are unqualified to comment upon whether shCherbak and Makukov are on to something, or whether they have made the same mistake as the one made by the yo-yos who said that the bible predicted the 9/11 attacks.  But that, of course, hasn't stopped anyone from commenting, especially the UFO and alien crowd, once they finished having multiple orgasms over the idea that terrestrial life might come from the stars.

So, here's where the overconclusion comes in, starting with an article in News.Com.Au entitled, "WE ARE STAR PEOPLE: Scientific Proof We Were Created By Aliens."  And from them we find out that the Kazakh scientists didn't just show that terrestrial life might have a signature in its DNA that indicates its alien origins, they showed that humans specifically were created by a superintelligent alien race:

Scientists from Kazakhstan believe that human DNA was encoded with an extraterrestrial signal by an ancient alien civilisation...  In a nutshell, we're living, breathing vessels for some kind of alien message which is more easily used to detect extra terrestrial life than via radio transmission...   So if we are just vessels for alien communication, exactly what kind of secret message are we carrying in our DNA?  And if we were the creation of aliens, who created them?

Premature questions to ask, don't you think, given that the mathematicians haven't yet weighed in on whether shCherbak and Makumov are correct?  And if they're correct, what it actually means?  Man, I just can't wait to see what Diane Tessman and Dirk VanderPloeg are gonna do when they find out about this.

So, that's it for today.  It'll be interesting to see whether anyone sits down with this data and goes through the hard work of checking the paper's conclusion.  If I were a betting man, I'd be putting my money on a statistical analysis of the "message" showing that it is very likely to be random -- i.e., not a message at all, but an artifact of the algorithm they used.  As appealing as the idea in "The Chase" was, I always thought that it was more of a justification by the writers of Star Trek as to why all of the aliens, who had evolved on other worlds Where No One Had Gone Before, just looked like humans with rubber alien noses and strange accents.  If their idea pans out, it would be pretty earthshattering -- but even then, we'll have to figure out what the message actually means, both literally and figuratively.

Or, as Gul Ocett said in "The Chase," "As far as we know, it might just be a recipe for biscuits."