I just finished reading Sean Carroll’s book The Making of the Fittest. Subtitled “DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution”, it’s the follow-on book to Endless Forms Most Beautiful. In this book Carroll devotes several chapters to demonstrating how, against our natural intuition, there really is enough time (given a few hundred million years) for DNA to mutate bit by bit and still make amazing new structures like eyeballs, wings, and that pink dangly thing that hangs at the back of your mouth.
Carroll also points out that while almost everything is in flux, genetically speaking, there are some stretches of DNA so crucial to life that they never change. Which is to say, they can’t change because any variation would be fatal. Here, for example, is a six amino acid stretch that has been found in every single living thing: KNMITG. It’s an immortal sequence, unvarying across more than a billion years.
The last chapter deals with the controversies associated with teaching evolutionary theory in public schools. This is well-traveled ground, but it got me thinking about how much the opponents of evolution focus on man, monkeys, and biology class. But shouldn’t they be attacking geology too? Some of them do, insisting, for example, that the Grand Canyon formed during Noah’s flood. But it seems that a serious and consistent creationist ought to stick those little “this is only a theory” labels in every science book on the shelf. The astronomy book, the geology book, the physics book, they should all be thrown out the window along with The Origin of Species. Why is poor old Darwin always taking the heat?
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 