Marc Kirschner’s idea of “bias toward useful variations” sure sounds teleological. I personally am biased to score well on standardized tests. And the reason for this bias is that I’m an intelligent agent who knows how to take these tests and score high. So perhaps Marc Kirschner’s theory of facilitated variation is a form of ID? You think he would warm to that idea? Probably not.
Answers to Darwin’s dilemma
Evolution is biased toward useful variations that emerge from genetic similarities shared by all living organisms
By Marc Kirschner
(June 9, 2006)
Biologist Marc W. Kirschner is founding chairman of the systems biology department at Harvard Medical School where he and his colleagues study the temporal and spatial cues that affect embryonic development. With co-author John Gerhart of the University of California, Berkeley, he explores natural selection in the face of biology’s most recent discoveries in The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma, which was reviewed by University of California, Irvine evolutionary biologist Francisco J. Ayala in the April issue of Science & Theology News.
With the release of the genome sequence in 2000, biologists finally realized that 22,500 is the magic number of genes needed to produce each person. That number is only one-and-a-half times that of a fruit fly and only six times the number in a bacterium — the simplest organism living on this planet. Looking at those genes, it was found that 15 percent were quite similar to those of bacteria, 50 percent were similar to those of a fruit fly, and 70 percent of flies were similar to those of a frog.
Humans are incredibly complex. Each person’s body contains about a hundred trillion cells and has probably thousands of cell types. So the question naturally arises: How do you get variety out of so few genes? How can animals be so different when many of the genes are the same? In short, where does novelty come from? Read More ›