Kudos to the editors at New Scientist for allowing my comments, which contradict the representation by Michael Le Page. Perhaps more discussion should be encouraged. For example, on 16 April 2008 Michael Le Page wrote: “The idea that many religious people find most satisfactory – that a deity intervened in and directed the evolutionary process – cannot be disproved but is not supported by any evidence.” See Evolution myths: Religion and evolution are incompatible: Subscription required.
My comment: Random mutations theory is not supported by any evidence, but Biblical Creation now seems supported as an allegorical representation of of how we evolved preferences for nutrient chemical-dependent food choice and pheromone-dependent mate choice.
The adaptive evolution of our socio-cognitive niche from microbes via ecological, social, and neurogenic niche construction, which enables us to make choices that are driven by instinct in other animals, may even be inspirational in the context of the genomic diversity we have now seen detailed in the ENCODE project data.
Besides, it may be a long time before there is a better explanation than Creation via evolution for the genomic diversity that has obviously resulted from gene duplication. No evidence suggests that the diversity is driven by random mutations, and I was surprised to see that explanation in a book recently co-authored by Francis Collins, who also wrote “The Language of God” and led the human genome project to its completion.
Now we known that our genomic diversity is clearly driven by food choice and associated pheromone-dependent social behaviors that lead to sexual reproduction and mate choice in men and women who choose what they eat and whether to sexually reproduce — unlike other animals.
There is an allegorical representation in Biblical Genesis of how we acquired our God-given ability to choose, albeit one that was better suited to deliver a Creation message to those who lived during times passed — until Sept 5, 2012, for example — when the ENCODE data helped to reveal the complexity of the cell, of the human genome, and of Creation via theistic evolution.
James V. Kohl detailedl how quantized energy-dependent microRNA biogenesis links the pheromone-controlled physiology of reproduction to biophysically constrained viral latency and healthy longevity. Links from what organisms eat to the enzyme-dependent metabolism of food also link metabolic networks to microRNA-mediated genetic networks in the context of RNA interference. Drug therapies alter RNA interference by altering cell type differentiation in all cells of all individuals of all species. For comparison, during the past 26 years, Kohl has detailed how the chemistry of protein folding is biophysically constrained at every level of biological organization by conserved molecular mechanisms.