Reading · Of Evolving Genomes and the Everlasting Life

In our daily lives, the natural world feels intuitive, logical, and sensible to us. Nature can be studied because it follows patterns and is predictable. Funny enough, physics was probably my favorite subject in high school before I became a biology major in college. I loved it because it was mostly math and conceptual things, unlike biology, where a lot of memorization was required. And now I’m doing a PhD in biology, but I am doing so much more thinking than memorizing.

Many of us began our science journey because we loved the subject and the concepts felt easy to grasp. But the more you learn about nature at a deeper level, it can seem very counterintuitive and paradoxical.

Here are some examples that always blow my mind when I stop and think about them.

According to Einstein’s General Relativity, space and time are woven together into a single, flexible fabric called spacetime. It can be stretched, compressed, and bent like Play-Doh (I’m exaggerating a little). The speed of light is universally constant, but time is not. You could technically ‘time travel’ into the future if you travel close to the speed of light (~300,000 km/s), because time would slow down on your end compared to those on Earth. I once told my physics professor that I was late because I ran so fast and time was dilated. That didn’t work. I still got marked absent from class. Gravity is more accurately described as the curvature of spacetime rather than a force. During a total solar eclipse, when the Moon blocks the Sun’s glare, you can see the background stars. The Sun’s massive gravitational field curves spacetime around it, causing the light from the background stars to bend slightly as it passes, like a curved baseball.

Matter is composed of atoms, which are mostly empty space with electrons around the nucleus. So every material thing, including the human body, is mostly empty space. The reason why we cannot walk through walls is that the negatively charged electrons repel each other. Both matter and light exhibit both wave-like and particle-like behavior^[2]. So I guess we also behave like both?

At the level of classical Newtonian physics, everything seems to be deterministic. The apple hit Isaac’s head while he was slacking under the tree just as it should. Get your F=ma calculation right and Messi scores the 8th goal in this FIFA World Cup.

But when you get to the quantum physics level, nothing makes sense anymore, and your mind starts to melt. You cannot know the exact position and the exact momentum of a particle. It’s like that friend of yours who is always MIA (missing in action). You can know exactly where he is, but you don’t know where he is going. Or he would tell you where he is going, but you have no clue where he is. Pretty frustrating at times for the physicists, but this is the nature of quantum mechanics.

This led Albert Einstein to famously say: “God does not play dice with the universe”, showing his distaste for how the universe seems to be non-deterministic. There’s also quantum entanglement and string theory. For the sake of sanity (mine and yours), I’m not gonna go into those. You are welcome. I’m glad I didn’t go into the physics field.

Well, biology is no better. If you don’t like exceptions, biology is not the field for you. You probably learned in high school that the central dogma of biology is “DNA to RNA to protein”. A recent study showed that a bacterial system can make DNA using a protein template^[3]. There are countless phenomena in biology that make you say: “What in the world is that? How does that even work?”

Life is weird. In the movie Finding Nemo, Nemo’s dad Marlin would have turned into a female after his mom died. That is a little awkward. And the octopuses? They possess three hearts and blue blood. They have 500 million neurons with two-thirds spread throughout their eight arms, each capable of independently smelling, tasting, and even ‘thinking’ on its own. Octopuses might just be the real aliens on our planet^[4]. Most genomes, including ours, are littered with repeats and transposons, also known as jumping genes. These elements make up about 45% of the human genome, and some of them have virus-like origins. Life is much more complex and weird than we thought, and we are discovering new things every day.

Most life forms look nothing alike at the surface level: a maple tree is nothing like a tomato plant and a dog looks nothing like a fish. But now we know they all share deep common ancestry with each other. All modern cetaceans (whales and dolphins) descended from four-legged, land-dwelling mammals. Absolutely mind-blowing. And all tetrapods, including humans, are technically lobe-finned fishes. Who would’ve thought we were all related? Evolution is counterintuitive, unfathomable at times, but nonetheless beautiful. At the end of On the Origin of Species, Darwin proclaimed: “...from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Who could’ve come up with such a creative method?

Materialists sought a deterministic universe, but quantum mechanics says probability is the best you can get. Anti-evolutionists tried to define creation “kinds”, but genetics tells us we are all part of the big family of life.

Nature is counterintuitive, bizarre, and weird. It often operates with rules that we don’t expect.

But why should it?

Why should our expectations of nature determine reality?

To Einstein’s rejection of quantum uncertainty, Bohr responded:

“Einstein, stop telling God what to do”.

Hi! I am Chi-Jing Leow, a Christian biologist. I am also a follower of Jesus, and I care deeply about exploring the topics at the intersection of science and faith.

Nature Is Counterintuitive and Weird

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