How Grandma’s Recipes Can Remind Us of God’s Recipes for Life–Genomes

As I think of my grandma’s recipe box, I can see the little headers that marked each section. There were sections for appetizers, salads, entrées, side dishes, and desserts. The recipes were tidily organized, based on what they had in common. But within each section, the recipes ranged from the simple to the elegant—from Jell-O salad to Waldorf salad, from Rice Krispie bars to a crème brûlée tart. Some recipes were short; others were quite long. Some used a single bowl; others dirtied every dish in the kitchen.

On each recipe card, there was always a list of ingredients followed by a set of instructions. Some instructions were vague and rather nondescript; others were more detailed, with clear and precise steps. Sometimes Grandma had altered the volumes of certain ingredients or adjusted the bake times. You might find little handwritten insertions or sections she had chosen to cross off entirely. She would often write little tips in the margins that would help ensure success.

Yet, if you have a grandma like this, I’m sure you know that when you try to recreate her masterpieces, they never turn out quite the same. Her recipes often included a “pinch” of this, or a “dash” of that. Just a subtle change in any of the ingredients could make the final product look and taste quite different from her blue-ribbon dishes. And you’ve maybe seen what happens if you forget the flour in your gravy or the baking powder in your pancakes! While I might have your mouth watering by now, you are probably wondering, “Where is she going with all this?” We are going to discuss genomes—the recipes for life.

So Many Recipes . . .

For centuries now, we have attempted to identify a filing system that would help us make sense of the “kinds” that God placed here on the earth.

“The genome is the entire set of DNA instructions found in a cell . . . [It] contains all the information needed for an individual to develop and function.”1 There is a vast array of recipes, from the amoeba to Aunt Melva. The earth is filled with living organisms that fill every niche in every ecosystem—God’s created kinds, adapting and flourishing as they have gone out to fill the earth. For centuries now, we have attempted to identify a filing system that would help us make sense of the “kinds” that God placed here on the earth. Indeed, maybe Carl Linnaeus got the whole idea for his renowned classification system from his grandma’s recipe box!

Just as Grandma needed her headers—from appetizers to desserts—Linnaeus needed headers, first, for animals, plants, and even minerals, then he continued to break it down from there. Grandma’s recipe box had things like pies, cakes, and cookies under the “Desserts” header. Linnaeus put things like mammals, birds, and amphibians under his “Classes” header. Things can be tidily organized, based on what they have in common.

Or maybe it’s not quite that tidy. As it turns out, we often struggle to know precisely where to place living organisms in this manmade construct for taxonomic classification. New discoveries have required tweaks to the system. New ideologies have birthed new systems. So maybe it’s not as easy to classify things as we thought. Grandma could have sorted her entrées out by what kind of meat they used (chicken, pork, beef) or how they were prepared (oven, grill, crockpot).

And sometimes a recipe doesn’t fit nicely into any one category. I have a sweet potato recipe that some might qualify as a vegetable side dish...but it has so much sugar, many would say it is a dessert! Regardless of how it is classified, it is amazing. And it is uniquely made with lots of love, and so are all of God’s creatures, great and small. I think the platypus might be a little bit like my sweet potato dish. Just where do you put a duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed, egg-laying, venom-shooting, aquatic creature? Regardless, it is amazing, and it is uniquely made with lots of love. We just don’t know quite where to file it!

So, organization, while imperfect, helps us get a handle on the basic categories for our recipes: recipes for food and for life. Sometimes we just have to make an executive decision on where to file things. At least for now, the sweet potato recipe will go under side dishes, and the platypus will go under mammals. But these are manmade (or grandma-made!) constructs, based on our understanding of what we know now. I sometimes wonder what the classification system would have looked like if it had been developed on day six of creation week. We continue to discover critters and creatures beyond the imagination—both living and extinct. What we thought we knew seems to fly out the window, and we have to think about things in a new way. We must reserve the right to shuffle things around from time to time or to consider adding a new header.

The Basic Ingredients (the 1.5%)

Let’s dive deeper into Grandma’s recipe box. One of the next things you might notice is how common some of the ingredients are under each of the various headers. Let’s look at desserts, for example. Just how many ways are there to recombine flour, sugar, eggs, and butter anyway? It turns out that how much you add, when you add it, and where you add it can result in all kinds of different mouth-watering delicacies. And what’s interesting is that cultures around the world have come up with their own variations on the theme. Flour, sugar, eggs, and butter can become lefse in Norway, scones in England, and kolaches in Czechoslovakia.

So, what about genetics? The increasing availability of complete genomes for various organisms has led to the field of comparative genomics. Just as it sounds, it is the exercise of making a thorough comparison between two or more genomes—identifying what is the same, what is different, and how it’s different. Since completion of The Human Genome Project, we have known that only around 1.5% of our DNA actually codes for proteins.2 And that 1.5% can be surprisingly similar—even between quite dissimilar organisms.

But remember Grandma’s recipes: in any given category, many of the ingredient lists were pretty similar, but the creations that came out of her oven could be very different. Maybe the 1.5% of the DNA that codes for proteins is the flour, sugar, eggs, and butter. Vertebrates have basic ingredients in common, like collagen, elastin, and keratin, among many other proteins. How much you add, when you add it, and where you add it can result in all kinds of critters! And if you look around the world, you certainly find variations on the theme. Collagen, elastin, and keratin can become a giraffe in the savanna of Africa, a panda in the bamboo forests of China, or a tiger in the jungles of India. But how, exactly, does that happen?

We may not have the exact answer yet, but we continue to pursue this elusive conundrum. What we know of genetics has been gradually accumulating for quite some time, and it surely has a long way to go. Over 150 years ago, Gregor Mendel was fiddling with peas in the parsonage and just beginning to understand the heritability of traits. It was nearly 100 years later that Watson and Crick cracked the code of DNA. Perhaps less well-known but no less amazing, in the late 1970s, researchers discovered that homeotic or homeobox (Hox) genes control the pattern of body formation during early embryonic development of organisms.3

This amazing family of genes encodes various transcription factors that tell the cells what part of the body to make and when and where. Genes are activated or repressed, resulting in the ordered development of any given organism. The information to produce a leg, for example, is in each cell, but Hox genes regulate when and where the leg forms in the developing embryo. Depending on the genetic blueprints available to them, they will direct the formation of a giraffe’s leg or a panda’s leg or a tiger’s leg. So, while there is much left to learn and discover, it would appear that the coding regions of DNA—the 1.5%—largely produce the basic ingredients and play an important role in overseeing the basic assembly of the organism.

The Chef’s Instructions (The 98.5%)

But what about all the specifics? How many legs? And how long should each one be? Should there be claws or toes or hooves at the end of it? For that, we move beyond the ingredients list to the instructions on Grandma’s recipe cards. You might notice, again, a bit of redundancy. It seems like you often see certain phrases, like preheat the oven to 350 degrees, melt the butter, beat the eggs, form the crust. There are likely common steps to “baking” a vertebrate too. The same basic instructions for building bones, muscle, skin, and organs likely exist in the various vertebrate genomes.

But the real detail is in all the other instructions on that recipe card—the whole paragraph at the bottom with how long to beat the eggs, what order to add the ingredients, how long to bake it. Maybe that’s the non-coding DNA—the remaining 98.5% that has been considered “junk” until only relatively recently. As molecular biologists decipher the code, bit by bit, they are finding it is anything but junk. Indeed, it appears to be the paragraph at the bottom of the recipe card holding all those detailed instructions.

For example, my husband and I have a dog. Our son has one too. But they sure don’t look the same! That paragraph at the bottom—all the details in the 98.5%—clearly has some differences on the bake times and notes in the margins. The instructions say to make the legs quite a bit shorter on my Welsh corgi than on our son’s golden retriever. The corgi’s ears perk upright, while the golden’s flop over. The long fur, or “feathers,” on the golden retriever’s legs and tail give it a very characteristic breed distinction vs. the tufts off the hindquarters, or “pants,” you find on a corgi. It’s still legs and ears and fur—just mixed and added and baked according to slightly different instructions. And these are rather subtle differences between two species of dogs. The instructions hidden in that elusive 98.5% would also yield the reason a giraffe has a spotted coat of fur and such a long neck while the armadillo has a highly keratinized, even bony, plate of armor and almost no neck at all.

Just a Little Tweak

Interestingly, people that live at high altitudes have learned to make adjustments in their baking because of their unique environment. They often need to set the oven temperature a little higher and take the cake out a little sooner, add a little less sugar and a little more milk. Just little tweaks to make do in a different environment. We are finding that there is an amazing ability of organisms to sense their environments and make adjustments in gene expression too. Epigenetics is an exploding field, unveiling the nuances of how slight modifications to DNA, like methylation or histone modification, can regulate gene expression. Without altering the DNA sequence, epigenetic factors can turn genes on or off, often in response to the environment or pressures on a population.4

Phenotypic plasticity is the name given the phenomenon whereby a single set of genes can produce different observable traits depending on the environment.5 Blind cavefish are a great example. You don’t need eyes in a dark cave, so those genes get turned off, and you get fish without eyes.6 These are like the instructions Grandma crossed off. Take her apple pie with candied crust, for example. There was no bottom crust. A step was skipped. Just a little tweak in the recipe.

And these changes can be fast, not requiring millions of years as the proponents of evolution might suggest. For example, it has been shown that male guinea pigs in a hot environment will produce sperm that will pass on heat-resistant characteristics to its offspring.7 The very next generation is prepared to survive and thrive in the environment it finds itself in. Sometimes these tweaks can be passed on to the next generation. Sometimes, in a more stable environment, we can see a reset to “normal.” Amazing! But then again, when the temperature was ninety-five degrees out, Grandma knew to serve iced tea. When it was below zero, she put on the tea kettle. And as great as my grandma was, God is far greater. Same ingredients get served up a little different. We should be amazed by what we see in God’s creation, but perhaps we should not be surprised.

Punctuation Matters!

“Your dinner versus you’re dinner:
one leaves you nourished and the other leaves you dead.”

The order of the instructions and the punctuation can make a big difference too. Let’s say Grandma’s recipe for carrot cake says, “Place 1 cake, domed side down, on a platter.” In doing so, we lay the bottom layer of the carrot cake on a serving platter. If we simply remove a comma and switch the order of a phrase, the instructions would read, “Place 1 cake on a platter, domed side down.” The outcome could be a cake placed on the bottom of the serving platter! This may be a silly example, but you get the point.

Like commas and periods in a paragraph, there are a number of different patterned or repeated sequences that can serve as punctuation marks within a given genome.

Like commas and periods in a paragraph, there are a number of different patterned or repeated sequences that can serve as punctuation marks within a given genome. These sequences ensure that cells correctly read and comprehend the message transmitted by the genomic sequences.8 Some research would suggest that as much as 50% of the human genome is made up of repetitive sequences9 and that they are highly involved in gene regulation, relevant to both gene expression and function.10 Just as a comma requires you to pause and a period means to stop, this genetic punctuation can control the meaning and the timing of the reading of the code. Additionally, there are regulatory proteins like promoters, enhancers, and silencers that all work together in irreducibly complex and intricately coordinated networks.11 So, even when the genomes of various organisms appear very similar (the same “letters” or “words”), it is this level of genetic instruction—that last paragraph on the recipe card with its unique order and punctuation and any little tweaks including additions or deletions—that results in the Chef’s masterpiece. Indeed, genes have been referred to as “molecular Swiss army knives, providing a diversity of products and outcomes depending on how they are operated and controlled.”12

Subtle Nuances

Earlier, we confessed that we just can’t seem to make our culinary efforts turn out quite like Grandma’s. There were so many little things that only she seemed to know how to do to get her pot roast to turn out juicy, full of flavor, and fall-apart tender pretty much every time! It seems like it would take a lifetime to learn all the subtle nuances of her cooking. But I didn’t have to know how to make her out-of-this-world caramel rolls in order to enjoy them with butter melting and sliding off the top!

When it comes to genomics, I feel like we are at the stage where we can stand in awe of God’s “cooking,” enjoying his creations even if we only understand the very basics regarding the required ingredients, the steps of preparation, the baking, and final touches. But there is still so much more to learn—all the subtle nuances. Even over the course of many lifetimes—generations of “cooks” poring over the recipe box of genomes—I think we’re still at the Jell-O salad stage when it comes to truly understanding. Maybe someday we will unravel more of the mysteries of the 98.5%, graduating to the crème brûlée tart level. The more we learn of the genome, the more we begin to appreciate its intricacy and complexity. It would seem obvious that the armadillo no more evolved over millions of years than my grandma’s caramel rolls magically formed themselves, arising from some simpler recipe. Even some secular scientists are beginning to have to consider alternative explanations.13 Maybe it’s more like Grandma’s recipe box than many would care to admit. There just might be a Chef after all! Even as we strive to learn just how he does it, let’s simply enjoy his cooking. There are so many amazing creations that have come out of his oven!

“O Lord, how manifold are your works!
    In wisdom have you made them all;
    the earth is full of your creatures.

Here is the sea, great and wide,
    which teems with creatures innumerable,
    living things both small and great.”

Psalm 104:24–25