Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Dobzhansky Nothing
Dobzhansky Nothing
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=nabt.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
National Association of Biology Teachers is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to The American Biology Teacher.
http://www.jstor.org
Nothing in Biology Makes Sense
126 THEAMERICAN
BIOLOGY
TEACHER,
MARCH1973
a multitude of species ex nihilo and then let most but so is the method of translation of the sequences
of them die out! of the "letters" in DNA-RNA into sequences of
There is, of course, nothing conscious or intention- amino acids in proteins. The same 20 amino acids
al in the action of natural selection. A biologic compose countless different proteins in all, or at
species does not say to itself, "Let me try tomorrow least in most, organisms. Different amino acids are
(or a million years from now) to grow in a different coded by one to six nucleotide triplets in DNA and
soil, or use a different food, or subsist on a different RNA. And the biochemical universals extend beyond
body part of a different crab." Only a human being the genetic code and its translation into proteins:
could make such conscious decisions. This is why striking uniformities prevail in the cellular metabo-
the species Homo sapiens is the apex of evolution. lism of the most diverse living beings. Adenosine
Natural selection is at one and the same time a blind triphosphate, biotin, riboflavin, hemes, pyridoxin,
and a creative process. Only a creative but blind vitamins K and B12, and folic acid implement meta-
process could produce, on the one hand, the tre- bolic processes everywhere.
mendous biologic success that is the human species What do these biochemical or biologic universals
and, on the other, forms of adaptedness as narrow mean? They suggest that life arose from inanimate
and as constraining as those of the overspecialized matter only once and that all organisms, no matter
fungus, beetle, and flies mentioned above. how diverse in other respects, conserve the basic
Antievolutionists fail to understand how natural features of the primordial life. (It is also possible
selection operates. They fancy that all existing spe- that there were several, or even many, origins of
cies were generated by supernatural fiat a few life; if so, the progeny of only one of them has sur-
thousand years ago, pretty much as we find them vived and inherited the earth.) But what if there
today. But what is the sense of having as many as was no evolution, and every one of the millions of
2 or 3 million species living on earth? If natural species was created by separate fiat? However of-
selection is the main factor that brings evolution fensive the notion may be to religious feeling and to
about, any number of species is understandable: reason, the antievolutionists must again accuse the
natural selection does not work according to a fore- Creator of cheating. They must insist that He delib-
ordained plan, and species are produced not because erately arranged things exactly as if his method of
they are needed for some purpose but simply be- creation was evolution, intentionally to mislead sin-
cause there is an environmental opportunity and cere seekers of truth.
genetic wherewithal to make them possible. Was the The remarkable advances of molecular biology
Creator in a jocular mood when he made Psilopa in recent years have made it possible to understand
petrolei for California oil-fields and species of Dros- how it is that diverse organisms are constructed from
ophila to live exclusively on some body-parts of such monotonously similar materials: proteins com-
certain land crabs on only certain islands in the Ca- posed of only 20 kinds of amino acids and coded
ribbean? The organic diversity becomes, however, only by DNA and RNA, each with only four kinds
reasonable and understandable if the Creator has of nucleotides. The method is astonishingly simple.
created the living world not by caprice but by evo- All English words, sentences, chapters, and books
lution propelled by natural selection. It is wrong to are made up of sequences of 26 letters of the alpha-
hold creation and evolution as mutually exclusive bet. (They can be represented also by only three
alternatives. I am a creationist and an evolutionist. signs of the Morse code: dot, dash, and gap.) The
Evolution is God's, or Nature's, method of Creation. meaning of a word or a sentence is defined not so
Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 B.C.; much by what letters it contains as by the sequence
it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago of these letters. It is the same with heredity: it is
and is still under way. coded by the sequences of the genetic "letters"-the
nucleotides-in the DNA. They are translated into
Unity of Life the sequences of amino acids in the proteins.
Molecular studies have made possible an approach
The unity of life is no less remarkable than its to exact measurements of degrees of biochemical
diversity. Most forms of life are similar in many re- similarities and differences among organisms. Some
spects. The universal biologic similarities are par- kinds of enzymes and other proteins are quasiuni-
ticularly striking in the biochemical dimension. versal, or at any rate widespread, in the living world.
From viruses to man, heredity is coded in just two, They are functionally similar in different living be-
chemically related substances: DNA and RNA. The ings, in that they catalyze similar chemical reactions.
genetic code is as simple as it is universal. There are But when such proteins are isolated and their struc-
only four genetic "letters" in DNA: adenine, gua- tures determined chemically, they are often found
nine, thymine, and cytosine. Uracil replaces thymine to contain more or less different sequences of amino
in RNA. The entire evolutionary development of the acids in different organisms. For example, the so-
living world has taken place not by invention of new called alpha chains of hemoglobin have identical
"letters" in the genetic "alphabet" but by elabora- sequences of amino acids in man and the chimpan-
tion of ever-new combinations of these letters. zee, but they differ in a single amino acid (out of
Not only is the DNA-RNA genetic code universal, 141) in the gorilla. Alpha chains of human hemoglob-