The Edge of Evolution

Michael J. Behe

Behe's main tool in this book is the human experience with malaria as he seeks to show that evolution can't do everything. That is, there is an "edge" to evolution, a limit to its capability. Malaria sweeps aside modern drugs by mutating to get around them, sometimes in weeks. A classic example of evolution at work. But it has had thousands of years to get around the sickle-cell trait, and has not been able to do so. And it has not been able to mutate to survive in other than tropical temperature environments. This makes the case that there is an "edge of evolution".

p1 "The three most important ideas to keep straight from the start are random mutation, natural selection, and common descent."

p13 HIV mutates 10,000 times faster than mutation rate of cells.

p14 In 50 years mutated more than cells in all the history of the Earth. Malaria in some areas kills half of all children before age of five. Only took a decade to develop resistance. Example of evolution brushing aside modern medicine.

p15 Sickle cell foils malaria. With a thousandfold more time to work than with modern medicine, evolution has failed to circumvent a tiny genetic change that produces the sickle cell.

p16 Devolution in E-coli. Many generations, easier for evolution to break things than to make them

p16 notothenioid fish survive freezing temperatures by making a strange type of antifreeze, but malaria can't manage to live at merely cool temperatures.

Ch 2

p17 "malaria offers our best case studies of Darwinian evolution in action."

p19 four lessons from malaria evolution.

p65 DNA progress

p66 Frequency of mutations, substitution mutation

p67 Examples HIV, Huntington's, Table of variations

p68 Inversion - new mosquito, gene duplication giving spare copy

p69 Sickle vs thalassemia, "mutations that help in trench warfare by breaking something will appear at a rate hundreds of times faster than ones that help by doing something new."

p69 mitochondrial eve idea

p70 hemoglobin gene identical with chimp, similar to others. Investigation based on nonfunctional parts of DNA that are shared.

p74 discussion of yeast - different functions, trace common ancestry, but rarely give new function.

p75 More malaria related examples

p76 mosquito and DDT

p77 rats and warfarin

p78 more about notothenioids, the fish with antifreeze.

p82 antifreeze vs malaria's inability to adapt to cold.

Ch 5

p85 bottom up - top down. Chlamydomonas. Cargo carriers.

p92 IFT needed for vision, kidney function,

p94 mousetrap revisited. IFT increases complexity.

101-102 characterizing the edge

Ch 6

p104 Evolutionary steps and coherence as conditions

p106 quotes of John Maynard Smith and H. Allen Orr. Restrict to single gene mutations.

p110 3 billion nucleotides, hundred million critical, rate of mutation. apply to sickle

p114 problem of incoherence and rugged landscapes

p119 "Darwinian ev olution is a tinkerer, not an engineer" Francois Jacob

p124 Bruce Alberts quote, protein machines

p129 shape space

p137 HIV compared to malaria

Ch 9

p171 "prokaryotic cells of bacteria and the more cmplex euaryotic cells of creatures ranging frm yeasts to humans."

p172 argues that prokaryotic cells will not progress to eukaryotic by random mutation, cites his examples of the cilium and IFT. Mentions biologists Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart in "The Plausibility of Life".

p174 Francois Jacob and Jacues Monod in the 1960s breakthrough - how proteins control DNA and life. Discusses glucose and lactose, that supressor supresses lactose use machinery when only glucose is present, but that lactose can latch onto that suppressor and cause it to drop off when lactose is present. This is a neat story, because without the DNA -level switch, the DNA would continue to manufacture the proteins necessary to metabolize lactose, which is a wasteful process if no lactose is present. Their work won a Nobel Prize.

p175 Control proteins, switch areas of gene on or off.

p176 Drosophila story

p177 Hox proteins

p181 Gehring the eye guy

Audio/Video Reference

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