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Fascinating stuff. The subdued response by hardcore materialists to the results of the Genome Project has been interesting to observe. As Commoner notes, Nicholas Wade, the public voice of orthodox scientific conventional wisdom, and others, merely asked the public to note how "humbling" the results were, wistfully telling us to note how closely related we are to the banana. None of them seemed ready to draw any big conclusions from the new data. One could almost see the wheels turning in their heads as they scrambled to save the fundamental mechanisms of evolutionary theory that they knew were threatened by the data.

Now that this new knowledge has had time to percolate through the scientific community, we see that non-dogmatists like Commoner are the first to find their voices. And the story they tell can be of little comfort to Dawkins and the gang. Complexity, once again, confounds and upsets the "just so" stories of our ever humble, grudgingly mortal Masters of the Universe.

The subdued response by hardcore materialists to the results of the Genome Project has been interesting to observe. As Commoner notes, Nicholas Wade, the public voice of orthodox scientific conventional wisdom, and others, merely asked the public to note how "humbling" the results were, wistfully telling us to note how closely related we are to the banana.

I haven't been following the Human Genome Project very closely. Last time I checked in I remember that we were "getting close" to a complete catalogue of all human genes. And then... silence. The issue had drifted off of my radar screen.

Then I stumbled across this article in Harper's in the (Boris Karloff accent) lavoratory at work. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to finish it. Glad you posted it. I had the same impression as you from what little I read. Something's going on here someone doesn't want us to know about...