 Harper One and Harper Audio Present. Darwin Devolves. The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution by Michael J. Becky. Read by Tim Andres Pabone. The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution. Break or blunt, any functional gene whose loss would increase the number of a species offspring. A note before we begin. Don't forget to download the accompanying enhancement PDF from your audio book provider. It contains figures and illustrations from the print edition. Be sure to check it out. Introduction. When I was a kid I would lie awake some nights, pondering existential questions. What is thought? Why am I me? How did the world get here? I admit I was a peculiar boy. But over time I found that nearly all my friends had asked themselves such questions too. It seems to come naturally with having a mind. Most of the time we're distracted with everyday activities. TV, school, dinner. But once in a while, in a quiet moment, we realize that something completely different must have happened to give rise to what we call ordinary life. Later I learned that not only young people ask that last question, young civilizations do too. Discussion of the enigma of where nature came from goes back as far as there are written historical records, and with a few lulls, has continued strongly up to the present. Yet despite the long and varied history of discourse, all particular positions on the topic can be considered to be elaborations of either of just two general mutually exclusive views. One, contemporary nature, including people, is an accident. And two, contemporary nature, especially people, is largely intended, the product of a pre-existing, reasoning mind. I will argue in this book that recent progress in our understanding of the molecular foundation of life decisively supports the latter view. To help frame the issues we'll consider later, let's first briefly recall a few highlights of what earlier writers thought about nature and purpose throughout history. The first person known to have discussed the likelihood of teleology, purpose in nature, was a Greek named Anaxagoras, who was born about the year 510 BCE in a region that's now part of Turkey. He thought, roughly, that the elements of matter originally were chaotic, fragmented, and mixed, but were then... Sample complete. Ready to continue?