And Finally the Hounding Duck Can Rest

For the past five days, I’ve been trying to get an answer from creationists. Today, I finally got it. And it’s an instructive lesson in how creationism makes itself irrelevant to the progress of science. Plus, it’s a good opportunity to look at the delightfully sloppy way our chromosomes evolve.

I’ve been blogging this experience along the way, so I won’t go back over it all again. Consider this the final chapter in a strange saga.

I do have to recap a little, though, so that this post makes sense.

As I blogged on Thursday, there’s a growing pile of evidence for how one of our chromosomes (chromosome 2) evolved through a fusion of two other chromosomes. I focused in particular on a paper that came out in the journal Genome Research last month from Evan Eichler at the University of Washington and his colleagues. Among many other pieces of evidence are telomeres, bunches of repeating DNA that typically form caps at the ends of chromosomes. There is telomeric DNA right in the middle of chromosome two.

On July 6, a site that promotes intelligent design (a k a the progeny of creationism) published an article by David Klinghoffer, the site’s ...