New Analyses Bolster Central Tenets of Evolution Theory

WaPo reported When scientists announced last month they had determined the exact order of all 3 billion bits of genetic code that go into making a chimpanzee, it was no surprise that the sequence was more than 96 percent identical to the human genome. Charles Darwin had deduced more than a century ago that chimps were among humans' closest cousins.

So what? If as ID suggests, and intelligent designer created both, why is it not reasonable that he would use a lot of the same building blocks on each species?

But decoding chimpanzees' DNA allowed scientists to do more than just refine their estimates of how similar humans and chimps are. It let them put the very theory of evolution to some tough new tests. If Darwin was right, for example, then scientists should be able to perform a neat trick. Using a mathematical formula that emerges from evolutionary theory, they should be able to predict the number of harmful mutations in chimpanzee DNA by knowing the number of mutations in a different species' DNA and the two animals' population sizes. "That's a very specific prediction," said Eric Lander, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., and a leader in the chimp project. Sure enough, when Lander and his colleagues tallied the harmful mutations in the chimp genome, the number fit perfectly into the range that evolutionary theory had predicted.

If Darwin was right, and chimpanzee's evolved into humans, surely 4% of their DNA did not change all at once. If Darwin was right, and some of the DNA changed, and then some more, and then some more, surely there should be fossile examples of the intermediate species.

Their analysis was just the latest of many in such disparate fields as genetics, biochemistry, geology and paleontology that in recent years have added new credence to the central tenet of evolutionary theory: That a smidgeon of cells 3.5 billion years ago could -- through mechanisms no more extraordinary than random mutation and natural selection -- give rise to the astonishing tapestry of biological diversity that today thrives on Earth. Evolution's repeated power to predict the unexpected goes a long way toward explaining why so many scientists and others are practically apoplectic over the recent decision by a Pennsylvania school board to treat evolution as an unproven hypothesis, on par with "alternative" explanations such as Intelligent Design (ID), the proposition that life as we know it could not have arisen without the helping hand of some mysterious intelligent force.

Could have, and did, are two different things. Perhaps it could have happened, just as an Intelligent Designer could have done it. The difference is that if Darwin was right, there would have been fossil records of the intermediate species, and there are not any, and if an Intelligent Designer did it, there would have been no need for intermediate species.

Pharyngula blogged You've written the best article on evolutionary theory I've seen in a newspaper yet.

blogged Can we please cut the CRAP...of (Un)Intelligent Design, already??

Julie blogged I have it on good authority from a biologist, that this Washington Pos

Feministe blogged Science class is for teaching science, not religion. Not “we don’t know, so God must have done it.” Not “evolution is only a theory” (gravity is also only a theory, but I’m not gonna start agitating for my kids to be taught intelligent falling).

If you knew what you were talking about, you would offer real evidence, not belittle the other side.