The Blind Locksmith

Over the last few years, scientists have figured out how to recreate biological molecules that were last seen on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago. Until now, scientists have reconstructed ancient proteins to gather clues about life was like long ago. But now some scientists at the University of Oregon have done something new with these old proteins: they used them to figure out how evolution produces complex systems--exactly the sort of systems that creationists would have us believe cannot evolve. Scientists reconstruct an ancestral protein by tracing its evolution into new versions carried by living species. Along each lineage, the gene for that protein picks up mutations, some of which alter the structure of the protein. Scientists can determine many of those mutations, and by working backwards up the evolutionary tree, they can determine what the original gene looked like. Thanks to powerful statistical techniques, they can determine ...