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LESCH-NYHAN syndrome causes compulsive self-mutilation. Children eat their lips or fingers and stab their faces with sharp objects. They feel the pain, but they can鈥檛 stop themselves. Why would a loving, all-powerful creator allow anyone to be born with such an awful disease?

Lesch-Nyhan is just one of that afflict humanity. At least 1 in 10 people have some kind of debilitating genetic disease, and most of us will become sick as a result of mutations that cause diseases such as cancer.

The reason? Our genome is an unmitigated mess. The replication and repair mechanisms are inadequate, making mutations commonplace. The genome is infested with parasitic DNA that often wreaks havoc. The control mechanisms are prone to error. The huge amount of junk, both between genes and within them, wastes cellular resources. And some crucial bits of DNA are kept in the mitochondria, where they are exposed to mutagenic waste products. 鈥淚t is downright ludicrous!鈥� declares John Avise, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Irvine.

The human genome, concludes Avise, offers no shred of comfort for those seeking evidence of a loving, all-powerful creator who had a direct hand in designing us, as not just creationists but many . If some entity did meddle with life on Earth, either it didn鈥檛 know what it was doing or didn鈥檛 care.

There is a need for a popular book explaining what a botch job our blueprint is but Inside the Human Genome is heavy going. And Avise鈥檚 conclusion made my jaw drop. 鈥淓volution by natural selection emancipates religion,鈥� he writes. 鈥淣o longer need we agonize about why a Creator God is the world鈥檚 leading abortionist and mass murderer.鈥�

I鈥檇 call it emasculation, not emancipation. If 鈥淕od鈥� is not the creator, why intervene in human affairs at all? Why worship a deity who can鈥檛 or won鈥檛 help? Avise never addresses these issues.

Instead, he goes further: 鈥淭he evolutionary-genetics sciences can thus help religion鈥� return to its rightful realm鈥� as a respectable philosopher counsellor on grander matters including ethics and morality.鈥� Yet, if conventional religious notions about biology are so misguided, it is downright ludicrous to suggest believers have some privileged insight into the morality of issues such as IVF, abortion and homosexuality.

To me, Avise misses the big point. Why do we continue to allow children to be born with hideous diseases? Our ethics have been so distorted by superstitious nonsense that we cannot see the clear moral imperative: we need to sort out our mess of a genome just as soon as we can.