The story is packaged as evidence for natural selection, but wait till you hear the details. Michael Denton is right.
From ScienceDaily:
Jumping genes, more formally known as transposable elements (TEs), are mobile segments of DNA that can change their position within a genome and alter the expression of other genes. Using fine-scale linkage and association mapping combined with next-generation DNA sequencing, the team established that a large transposable element, inserted within the moth’s cortex gene, was responsible for the colour change.
Dr Ilik Saccheri, from the University’s Institute of Integrative Biology, who led the research, said: “This discovery fills a fundamental gap in the peppered moth story. The fact that this famous mutant is caused by a transposable element will hopefully attract more interest in the impact of mobile DNA on fitness and the generation of novel phenotypes.”
…
The same jumping gene appears to control some cases of butterfly mimicry.
Dr Saccheri commented: “This is highly unexpected, both because the butterfly and moth polymorphisms appear very different to the eye, and the species are separated by over 100 million years. What this suggests is that the cortex gene is central to generating pattern diversity across the Lepidoptera, and more generally that adaptive evolution often relies on a conserved toolkit of developmental switches.” Paper. (paywall) – Arjen E. van’t Hof, Pascal Campagne, Daniel J. Rigden, Carl J. Yung, Jessica Lingley, Michael A. Quail, Neil Hall, Alistair C. Darby& Ilik J. Saccheri More.
In short, Michael Denton is right. Denton focuses on the many examples of fundamental features of life forms, like the pentadactyl limb of vertebrates, that are uniform but serve no adaptive purpose in particular at a given time, pointing perhaps to discoverable physical patterns in nature, like those of the chemical elements.
Denton is right: Patterns available for 100 million years will prove adaptive in one situation or another but they probably did not arise as in Darwin’s famous dictum:
It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
See also: Michael Denton on the discontinuity of nature
Natural selection: Could it be the single greatest idea ever invented?
and
Life continues to ignore what evolution experts say
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