06.29.07
Evo-devo: changing your story in slow motion
Observe, as pointed out many times on this blog, the blatant way the Darwin establishment is absorbing the ‘design’ challenge even as they denounce it.
We are told that Darwin was wrong, on the way to maintaining that he was right, and that evo-devo, highly organized and programmatic structures are now the answer, and the design people are stupid, wrong, etc….
I fault the design people for the way their excessive claims have spoiled the obvious point they were making.
Yoon’s article covers the remarkable discoveries supporting “evo-devo,” which is based on the idea that major turns in evolutionary history might have arisen from changes in developmental processes governed by a few regulatory genes. Rather than assuming that evolution of new forms requires the gradual accumulation of many small genetic mutations, evo-devo works on the thought that slight changes in the expression of a few regulatory genes could produce dramatic changes in form and even the emergence of new species. It has seemed to me for a long time that evo-devo is likely to answer many puzzles in evolutionary theory. In any case, this illustrates the remarkably rich research being done in evolutionary science today. By contrast, I am unaware of any comparable research being done by proponents of “intelligent design theory” or “scientific creationism.” The mere fact that neither ID nor Biblical creationism leads to any novel research to test alternatives to evolutionary science indicates the intellectual poverty of such positions.