Following the questions
Horned beetles that don’t always grow horns; sedges with
mixed-up chromosomes; African violets fitting their flowers to
their pollinators; adulterous fairy-wrens. None of these are
finished stories. Their evolution, and the research into it,
continues. There is no final answer, only deeper questions—many of
which lead back to the far-seeing work of Charles Darwin.
The difficulty with Darwin’s ideas, among the scientists of his
own day, stemmed from the fact that no one had a clue how natural
selection could work. “Darwin didn’t know anything about genetics,”
says Webster. “The scientific debate over whether evolution had
occurred or not died within a few years of the publication of that
book [On the Origin of Species]. The debate that continued
on was how. What were the mechanisms?”
When Mendel’s work on the laws of inheritance was discovered in
the early 1900s, biologists finally could “put teeth into the
theory,” as Webster says. Since then, evolutionary biologists have
found that even without knowledge of genetics, Darwin got the
general outlines of the story, and many of the details, absolutely
right.
In recent decades an explosion of new molecular techniques has
enabled researchers like Corley, Roalson, and Webster to pursue
many of Darwin’s old questions, as well as pose some new ones. If
they run into a door they can’t open, a question they can’t answer,
they may shift their focus to another organism or another problem.
But they will keep the hard question in mind; and when they learn
of a new technique that could help, they’ll return to it. Science
runs on curiosity and patience. “Unanswerable” questions are an
invitation to further thought; they are never a reason to stop
searching.
“There’s a difference between ‘We don’t know yet’ and
‘This is unknowable,’” says Eric Roalson. “Sometimes people
interpret uncertainty as, well, this is something we won’t ever be
able to figure out. These are very complex systems, and we have
made great strides over the last hundred years in trying to
understand what’s going on. There’s still a lot that we don’t
understand fully. But we have ideas and pieces of the puzzle.
“I think that if we want to know it, eventually we
can know it.”
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