For a period of time, as a teenager, I had fairly bad acne and, at one point, was looking into Accutane — touted then as a sort of "miracle drug" in that category. I remember a physician likening the mechanism which produced acne as being a sort of light bulb; Accutane, he explained, "snuffed out that light bulb."

This sounded a bit disturbing, in light of how little we know about the body: "Isn't it possible we might need that?" (I mean, let's remember how thalidomide and lobotomies worked out.) I didn't see it as a religious question in any sense, but somehow this prompted the good doctor to launch a speech about creationism, and how evolution supposedly implied that there were many parts of our bodies which served no useful purpose at all — the appendix, for example.

I was, as they say, nonplussed. Was it somehow a point of religious dogma to assume we hadn't yet discovered every function for every element in the body? Was it a tenant of some faith that we probably shouldn't "snuff out" elements of our biochemistry before we fully understood what they were doing? But apparently someone had a strong need to turn a simple question from an acne-ridden teenager into a religious lecture! (And secularists allege Christians run around pushing their faith on people at inappropriate moments?)

I was reminded of this recently, as I've been reading a bit about "Junk DNA" — segments of the genome which don't seem to code for anything in particular. As with my doctor, this topic once seemed to have an almost religious import for Richard Dawkins:

It consists of multiple copies of multiple copies of junk, 'tandem repeats', and other nonsense which may be useful for forensic detectives but which doesn't seem to be used in the body itself. Once again, creationists might spend some earnest time speculating on why the Creator should bother to litter genomes with untranslated pseudogenes and junk tandem repeat DNA.

Science entirely aside, this is a bizarre theological argument. If the mere existence of something which didn't immediately appear useful disproved God's existence, then why wait for the discovery of junk DNA? Why not point to the nearest pebble, which, at least in itself, the world could undoubtedly live without? The ancients looked to the sky and understood, in religious awe, they were a very, very tiny part of creation. Dawkins could have pointed out that those stars were strong evidence for God's non-existence, given that they apparently could have lived their lives just fine without most or all of them.

Me: "Why is there lint in my dryer?"
Dawkins: "It's further proof of God's nonexistence, since it serves no obvious purpose!"
Me: "Um, since it just answered a major theological question, wouldn't that mean it just served a very important purpose?"
Dawkins: "Shut up."

Sticking, for another moment, to the theological, one of the weird things about certain atheists is that they seem to know exactly what God must be like in order to exist. (Given that God doesn't, they believe, exist, this is a very strange conviction indeed — to know so intimately something which has never been.) In Dawkins' case, God apparently must not exist as long as unanswered questions do. The Greeks wondered what purpose the brain served, given that the liver was the seat of intelligence and the soul. Well, it proved God didn't exist, because, after all, why would an intelligent creator have put a completely useless mass of spongy grey matter in our skull?

Getting back to the science: Time has not been kind to my doctor, nor, for that matter, to Dawkins on this point. Accutane turned out to have a rather long laundry list of debilitating — and often permanent — side effects (as one might expect when "snuffing out" some bodily function), and is only now given under "close medical supervision." We've also learned that the seemingly useless tonsils and appendix both play an important role in immune system development. And that "junk" DNA?

Researchers the world over are confirming that non-coding DNA holds critical clues to a vast range of diseases; breast cancer, HIV, Crohns disease, Alzheimer's, heart disease, ovarian and skin cancer... the list is growing daily. A leading figure in world genetics, Prof. John Mattick, recently claimed that, "the failure to recognise the implications of the non-coding DNA will go down as the biggest mistake in the history of molecular biology."

Nope, nothing useful there.

If creationists were supposed to spend a lot of time pondering why God would allow huge swaths of "junk DNA" (when it was felt to be such) then shouldn't, conversely, atheists — or at least Richard Dawkins — be spending a lot of time admitting this must be — by his rules, anyway — evidence for God? Or does he prefer to live in the realm of non-falsifiable beliefs? (Code in my world for "non-science".) The latter, apparently, given his conspicuous absence of a public mea culpa on this point.

Of course, the idea was idiotic in the first place. Wouldn't there be an evolutionary disadvantage in carrying around organs like the appendix and tonsils which, it was felt, had no use? Since these sometimes must be removed to save lives: if they provided no larger compensating benefit, wouldn't a version of the creature lacking them have a distinct evolutionary advantage? And even storing and replicating mere "junk DNA" takes energy: wouldn't cells reproduce faster and cheaper without it, also conferring an evolutionary advantage? These would seem rather obvious arguments in retrospect. And yet....

Just as Einstein spent years trying to expunge "inflation" from his general theory of relativity because he (and so many of his peers) intensely disliked the implications of such — when, in fact, it pointed accurately toward the big bang — so also Dawkins and others inadvertantly did their best to keep us from discovering one of the most interesting aspects of the human genome. It is said that belief in "design" isn't scientific because it produces no testable conclusions. Really? Then shouldn't Dawkin's assertions to the contrary have been equally untestable? And, once falsified, shouldn't it have been admitted, then, that had most of his community either kept their religion out of their research — or started from the opposite view — that we would be further ahead, scientifically, than we are today?