Jonathan Wells, "Weed Poses Problem for neo-Darwinism" (2005)

In a recent article in Nature [1], Pruitt and his co-workers reported that Arabidopsis plants with two copies of a mutant gene ("Hothead," which causes petals and leaves to stick together) could produce offspring with normal rather than mutant genes. Although many cases are known in which offspring with mutant genes are morphologically and functionally normal, the offspring in this case actually have normal genes. Pruitt and his co-workers ruled out contamination from normal seeds and the possibility that the offspring had simply back-mutated. If confirmed by others, their discovery represents a significant exception to the classical Mendelian doctrine that genes are stably passed down from parents to offspring.

Pruitt and his co-workers deserve credit for paying attention to an anomaly that would have been all too easy to ignore. As every practicing biologist knows, experiments with living things almost always have loose ends and unexplained data. We focus on those data that are relevant to the question we're asking, and we tend to ignore the rest. But the "the rest" is often where the really interesting stuff lies, and Pruitt and his co-workers made an interesting discovery by following the evidence wherever it led.

The discovery presents a problem for neo-Darwinism, which assumes that DNA mutations and natural selection are the engine of evolution.

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Yet natural selection generally has a stabilizing effect (i.e., it tends to eliminate organisms that deviate from the mean); and now it seems that at least some organisms also have the ability to correct DNA mutations from one generation to the next. In other words, the engine of evolution is running on fumes.

Much more serious for neo-Darwinism, however, is the fact that DNA sequences do not determine all (or even most) of the essential features of an organism. To be sure, DNA mutations can screw up almost anything about an organism, but since DNA prescribes the organism's protein building-blocks, this is a bit like saying that handing lop-sided bricks to a brick-layer can screw up a house. The form of the organism is not dictated by its proteins, just as the floor plan of a house is not dictated by its bricks.

What DOES determine the form of an organism, then? The truth is, we don't know -- though we do know that some heritable developmental information is outside of the DNA in the membrane and the cytoskeleton. Neo-Darwinism has so totally dominated biological research for the past few decades that almost nobody has been looking for the true nature and location of developmental information. When the nature and location of that information are discovered -- and I am confident that ID, not neo-Darwinism, will guide the research that leads to the discovery -- it will be clear that organisms are far more complex -- and far more difficult to change by undirected processes -- than neo-Darwinists ever imagined.

[1] Lolle, S.J., Victor, J.L., Young, J.M., and Pruitt, R.E., "Genome-wide non-mendelian inheritance of extra-genomic information in Arabidopsis," *Nature* 434 (24 March 2005): 505-509.