Creation Read Online Free PDF Page B

a squirrel, and a suspiciously well-fed wood pigeon. I know that there are millions of other beings nestling in the soil, feeding on the leaves, hiding in the mortar between bricks. I know that there are tiny parasitic insects hitching rides on the hairs of the squirrel and in the feathers of the bird, and that those bugs themselves are serving as a rich habitat for thousands of bacteria. I know that on Earth bacteria outnumber and outweigh all other living things by count and by mass, and there are billions in every spadeful of loam. As undergraduates my classmates and I grew cultures of bacteria taken from swabbing our teenage skin and streaking them out in their multitudes on agar plates. You can look down at the end of your nose and be confident that there is more life in that view than in the rest of the known off-world universe. We have classified around two million living species, and we know that number is a massive underestimate, as new ones are discovered and named every day. Life is bewilderingly diverse. What is more confounding, though, is its conformity.
    It doesn’t take a great leap of faith to see that we are closely related to chimpanzees or gorillas. Only a designer setting out to deceive or fundamentally lacking in imagination or effort would create things so similar and pretend that they were not cousins. It is obvious that dogs in all their human-crafted forms are related closely to wolves, and science confirms it. It takes a little bit more analysis to show that dolphins are much more closely related to hippos than to tuna, but dig deeper and it becomes obvious that all three species have common ancestry visible in their spines, eyes, and the bone structure (among many other things) of their flippers, feet, and fins, respectively. Yet it’s admittedly harder to see the commonality between the leaf of a sycamore and the fin of a cichlid. Or a western long-beaked echidna and the recently discovered Malaysian mushroom
Spongiforma squarepantsii
. Or
Turdus philomelos
and
Candida albicans
: one is a pretty songbird, the other a creamy fungus, but both are called “thrush.”
    This zoo is made of cells of many different sizes and shapes. And yet all cells are basically the same, just as all gasoline-powered cars are basically the same. Cars have a chassis, an engine, some wheels (usually four), a steering wheel, and so on. The details of the engine, the design, the tires, et cetera comprise the difference between a Porsche 911 and a Pinto. Fundamentally, however, they are both cars, derived via successive iterations from a common ancestor, one that bore an early version of the internal combustion engine built from metal and powered by fossil fuel. And so it is with cells. Under the hood there are mechanisms and parts that vary the performance of a cell depending on its job, as part of an organism or standing alone. Cells, in terms of their overall structure, are basically the same, but are highly specialized to build the complexities and adaptations of all life.
    The starting point for those basics of biology was the result of cell scientists making forward strides in the mid-1800s. This was clearly a feverish time, as Darwin was also deducing evolution, and a few thousand miles east, an Austrian holy man was planting a garden that would invigorate biology forevermore. Gregor Mendel is invariably described as a monk, which, while absolutely true, shrouds the fact that his legacy is unequivocally as a scientific genius and world-changing experimentalist. 1 Around the time Darwin was writing his masterpiece, Mendel had been studying pea plants and was breeding them in the tens of thousands. As any scientist will tell you, large numbers make for good statistics. What Mendel found in impressively large numbers was that, when crossing variants of pea plants with one another, the outcomes in the offspring were entirely predictable. He showed, moreover, that the traits were inherited in a discrete