Wednesday 15 April 2015

C. elegans: Tiny Worm Defies Evolution


Caenorhabditis elegans. Image courtesy of K.D. Schroeder, Wikimedia Commons (License: CC-BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

Caenorhabditis elegans is a tiny worm, a mere millimetre long, but the way it develops is anything but simple.

This should probably be no surprise as creatures like fruit flies are amazing, and even bacteria are full of elegant molecular machines.

Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture has produced two YouTube videos about C. elegans. One of them features CSC Fellow Dr. Paul Nelson, who says that when in comes to the way the worm’s cell lineages become specified, “the case for design could not have been made more explicit.”

The development of C. elegans defies Darwinian explanations:

There must be some governing logic, some control system, that tells those lineages what they're going to do as they are specializing. And I think from the perspective of an undirected process like natural selection or evolution generally, it's very hard to see how you can build that without knowing where you were going.”








Videos courtesy of Discovery Institute.