In a new book, The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma, Harvard Medical School’s Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, of the University of California–Berkeley address a key problem in evolutionary theory that has puzzled scientists from Darwin on and which is now under intense scrutiny by proponents of intelligent design: where do the big jumps come from in evolution? Kirschner, HMS professor and chair of the Dept. of Systems Biology, and Gerhart show that newly discovered molecular properties of organisms facilitate evolution. The origin of novelty, the development of new arrangements of interlocking parts that some call “irreducibly complex,” can only be understood in the light of the last 20 years of research in cell biology and development.
