Dr. Stephen Meyer

And is that a possibility or is that— Yeah, mutations can sometimes be favorable, but they're more often deleterious, but they can sometimes be favorable.

But they typically lead to very limited biological change, and they don't change body plans.

And let me just—I'll give you a—

It's a little bit of a biology lesson, but I think it's a fun one.

So there's something that some Caltech scientists have discovered called developmental gene regulatory networks.

So the idea is that as an organism is going through development, a fertilized embryo, a fertilized egg, and it then will divide from one cell into two, into four, into geometric expansion.

And as the organism is developing, more and more cells come online, and the cells have to differentiate themselves one from another.

You have some cells become muscle cells, some cells become nerve cells, some become maybe bone, et cetera.

Now...

When the scientists have mapped out what's controlling the different expression of genetic information in different cells at different times, they map that out, and it looks like an integrated circuit.

There's this integrated control of the expression of information so that a gene will produce a gene product

a regulatory RNA or a protein, which will in turn either turn on or turn off some other part of the genome.

So it's all carefully choreographed and integrated.

So when they map all this out, it looks like an integrated circuit such that – well, and what they found experimentally is if you start to perturb these regulatory networks –

the animal will shut down.

If you change them very much at all, then the animal development will just shut down.

The animal will die before it reaches full development.

So here's the problem.

You have this gene regulatory network.

It's absolutely necessary to build an animal body plan, to get all the cells in the right place so that everything is differentiated and is performing its correct function.