Here are a collection of comments about genes from various scientists. Although the Bible doesn’t mention them, everyone has them – they are part of our God-given human body. While we can’t escape them, neither do they predetermine who we are or what we will do.
“A newborn infant is not a blank page; however, his genes do not seal his fate. . . . My genes have indeed determined what I am, but only in the sense that, given the succession of environments and experiences that were mine, a carrier of a different set of genes might have become unlike myself.” (Theodosius Dobzhansky , THE OXFORD BOOK OF MODERN SCIENCE WRITINGS, p 23)
God commanded us humans to be fruitful and multiply, and God made genetics part of this reproductive process. The genes are one way for there to be orderly reproduction in which any species produces offspring similar to itself.
Life is a slippery thing to define, but it consists of two different skills: the ability to replicate and the ability to create order. Living things produce approximate copies of themselves . . . In Erwin Schrodinger’s phrase, living creatures ‘drink orderliness’ from the environment.
The key to both of these features of life is information. The ability to replicate is made possible by the existence of a recipe, the information that is needed to create a new body. (Matt Ridley, THE OXFORD BOOK OF MODERN SCIENCE WRITINGS, p 37)
DNA is another form of Scripture that has recorded what God has been doing in humans (or any species for that matter) since creation came into existence.
In the beginning was the word. The word was not DNA. That came afterwards, when life was already established, and when it had divided the labor between the separate activities: chemical work and information storage, metabolism and replication. But DNA contains a record of the word faithfully transmitted through all subsequent aeons to the astonishing present. (Matt Ridley, THE OXFORD BOOK OF MODERN SCIENCE WRITINGS, p 40)
To understand humans biologically, we have to understand genetics, for the genes record the information which is being passed down from one generation to the next.
… the novel feature of biological systems: that, in addition to flows of matter and energy, there is also the flow of information. Biological systems are information processing machines and this must be an essential part of any theory that we may construct. We therefore have to base everything on genes, because they carry the specification of the organism and because they are the entities that record evolutionary changes. (Sydney Brenner , THE OXFORD BOOK OF MODERN SCIENCE WRITINGS, p 44)
We can study ancient humans through anthropology and archaeology – excavating ancient cities, sifting through the remnants of cultures which disappeared long ago. Even if those cultures left no written history, we can still study them and learn a great deal about them. We also can study our current genes to see how humanity has changed through history.
Fossil bones and footsteps and ruined homes are the solid facts of history, but the surest hints, the most enduring signs, lie in these minuscule genes. For a moment, we protect them with our lives, then like any runners with a baton, we pass them on to be carried by our descendants. There is a poetry in genetics which is more difficult to discern in broken bones, and genes are the only unbroken living thread that weaves back and forth through all these bone yards. (Jonathan Kingdon, THE OXFORD BOOK OF MODERN SCIENCE WRITINGS, p 189)
Fraternized 