New grant proposal: My views on evolution

I recently submitted a new grant proposal to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study how to detect genetic phenomena associated with drug resistance, virulence, and epidemics. Back in 2003 I developed a software package in my laboratory called TreeSAAP (Selection on Amino Acid Properties using phylogenetic trees). Of course it involved nearly a dozen people, but the software was based on a mathematical model I created while a PhD student, used to detect the subtle influences of environmental influences on genes that encode proteins. This past summer I discovered how to apply the model to even more subtle influences, down to the level of a single nucleotide mutation. This may hold a great deal of potential for studying infectious diseases in humans. The proposal I wrote seeks to expand my preliminary research to comprehensively test the model to establish how accurate it is, not only compared to other competing models (actually it blows them out of the water), but how well it actually picks up known viral adaptations and filters out random noise.

I am writing another grant to the National Science Foundation (NSF) that's due a week from Tuesday that will seek to apply a similar approach to the study of population genetics. My hope is to reduce the evolutionary process down to mutational phenomena such that we can tell when organisms may be adapting to a change in the environment. My thesis is that biological organisms are much more adaptable than we give them credit for. This challenges the paradigm that man is causing a mass extinction because if most species are maliable with respect to the environment, then the only ones going extinct are those that are not, reducing the idea of extinction to natures way of making sure the overall gene pool is strong for all of life - just another law of nature. Just like the story of the Garden of Eden - death comes into the world so that life can exist and become more godlike. Evolution, therefore, is merely God's way of filling the earth with the best possible things and eliminating those things that don't fulfill the measure of their creation, much like the process He uses to populate the Celestial Kingdom.

Just thought you would like to know where I stand...