• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 301 0

theorists will respond that the researcher acted as an intelligent designer would have in nature, and thus this supports their case; but, in fact, the researcher was acting as the force of natural selection, and thus this is evidence for evolution in action. Bardwell concluded that “the naturally occurring enzymes involved in disulfide bond formation are a biological pathway whose main features are the same from bacteria to man. People often speak of Computer Assisted Design (CAD), where you try things out on a computer screen before you manufacture them. We put the bacteria we were working on under a strong genetic selection, like what can happen in evolution, and the bacteria came up with a completely new answer to the problem of how to form disulfide bonds. I think we can now talk about Genetic Assisted Design (GAD).”

Perhaps we should now talk about GAD instead of GOD.

Microevolution and Macroevolution: Life shows signs of intermittent intelligent design intervention that accounts for large-scale changes.

Ever since Darwin, creationists have argued that natural selection can account for minor changes within a species, but cannot produce new species, new body forms, or new lineages. The argument presented today is a more sophisticated version in which, according to some (but not all) theorists, several billion years ago an Intelligent Designer created the first cell with the necessary genetic information to produce all of the irreducibly complex systems we see today. Then the laws of nature and evolution took over to create diversity within each species. When totally new and more complex species, body forms, and lineages appear in the fossil record, these are signs of the Intelligent Designer stepping in, intervening with a new design element. Microevolution proceeds by natural selection, but macroevolution is in the hands of the Designer.

First, how does one distinguish the processes of microevolution (evolution within and below the species level) from those of macro-evolution (evolution above the species level)? Within evolutionary biology there has been considerable debate about whether the microevolutionary process of natural selection operating on individuals within populations can by itself account for the diverse macroevolutionary forms of life. Today, the new science of evolutionary developmental biology, “evo-devo” for short, reveals that the wide diversity of forms evolved through an interaction of the embryological development of forms and the subsequent pruning of these forms by natural selection.

For example, it turns out that the bodily architecture of vertebrates is the product of blueprint Hox genes that direct the construction of repeating parts, such as ribs and vertebrae. In embryological development, various structures form or do not form depending on whether the Hox genes are expressed or not. Natural selection operates on expressed forms only, since these result in organisms that survive long enough to pass on their genes for the future expression of those forms. Similarly, the wide variety of eyes found throughout the animal kingdom—from the compound eyes of flies to the camera eyes of vertebrates—evolved under the control of the commonly shared Pax-6 gene, which directs the production of photoreceptor cells and light-sensing proteins. Each type of complex eye we find today evolved from simpler photoreceptive structures in a distant common ancestor of arthropods, cephalo-pods, and vertebrates. Evo-devo biologist Sean Carroll explains that

the ancestor possessed two kinds of light-sensitive organs, each one endowed with a distinct type of photoreceptor, as well as with light-sensitive proteins called R-opsin and C-opsin, respectively. One organ was a simple two-celled prototype eye; the other, called the brain photoclock, was a part of the animal’s brain and played a role in running the animal’s daily clock. The arthropod and squid retinas incorporated the photoreceptor from the simple prototype eye, whereas the vertebrate eye incorporated both kinds of photoreceptor into its retina.45