NEW ADVANCES IN EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE Date: Friday, October 1, 1999 Section: Source: By LINDA SEEBACH Scripps Howard News Service Memo: For SUNDAY release (Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Denver Rocky Mountain News.) Edition: Oh, wonderful. Just what forward-looking, high-tech, well-educated Colorado needs; to share with Kansas an "Ig Nobel'' prize in science education because its standards for teaching evolution are so wimpy. The annual Ig Nobel ceremony at Harvard recognizes achievements "that cannot or should not be reproduced.'' Light-hearted in form, it is earnest in intent; several Nobel laureates of the conventional sort participate enthusiastically. Emily Rosa accepted the award on behalf of Colorado. Emily, 12, attends Liberty Common Charter School in Fort Collins, Colo.; she and her parents are protesting the school's decision not to teach evolution in its science classes. Colorado's state science standards say evolution explains "the ways in which natural processes produce life's diversity.'' But they don't require that children ever see the evidence that humans are a result of these same natural processes. That partly reflects political reality. In a recent Colorado News Poll, nearly a third of state residents agreed that "God created man in his present form all at once in the last 10,000 years'' comes closest to their personal beliefs. So many people can't be ignored; unfortunately, they are wrong as to multiple matters of fact. Even our own species dates back more than 50,000 years; in addition, there have been multiple hominid species over the last 4 million years or so, since the hominid line branched off from other primates. I understand that religious people hold these beliefs sincerely. But in return for the consolation and support of religion they willingly give up all of geology and astronomy as well as big chunks of biology, chemistry and physics. Their position resembles that of the Roman Catholic Church of Galileo's time, denying that the planets circle the sun because theology required that everything in the universe revolve around us. Ultimately it is untenable, though it took the church several centuries to concede officially that Galileo was right. Schools cannot wait centuries. Not with new information from genetics redrawing life's family tree almost every week. The New York Times science section reported recently on revised theories of plant evolution; "fungi like mushrooms,'' it said, "have now been revealed as being closer to animals like humans than to plants like lettuce." The Economist, reporting on a major scientific conference devoted to the genetics of a tiny worm called Caenorhabditis elegans, said "Although the worm is reckoned to have roughly 20,000 genes (only a quarter of the human number) over 70 percent of those genes are also found in people.'' Such a wonder of new data demands new theories. This is no longer Darwin's Darwinism, which described the gradual adaptation of an existing species through the accumulation of small changes. As creation scientists never tire of pointing out, the fossil record doesn't look like that. Darwin, though, knew nothing of genetics, which hadn't been invented yet. Current evolutionary theories - and a multiplicity of competing theories is a strength of science, not a weakness - rely on insights from genetics to explain how distinctively new species could appear suddenly. Jeffrey Schwartz, a professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, presents those theories in a new book, "Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species.'' Biologists have identified a set of genes called "homeobox genes'' that regulate when other genes turn on and what they do. The same cluster of homeobox genes regulates the growth of fins in fish, wings in birds and hands and feet in four-footed mammals, though fish have one set and vertebrates have four. A mutation in one of these regulatory genes can result in novel features "that emerge full-blown and viable.'' Humans and chimpanzees, for example, share about 99 percent of their genes, but the ones they don't share are the ones that manage how the rest work. Both microevolution (change within species) and macroevolution (the origin of species) can arise through micromutation, if the micromutation occurs in an organism's fundamental blueprint. He has lots of examples, and also a wonderful romp through the curlicues of evolutionary theory since Darwin. Read it to find out the myriad ways scientists have been wrong; I expect he will be widely quoted, out of context, by apologists for young-earth creation theories. But also read it - especially if you're from Colorado or Kansas - to find out what you're missing in school.