Evo Devo has revealed the continuity among forms that was masked or about which there were uncertainties based on appearance alone. By revealing the developmental similarities among structures, Evo Devo presents a wholly new kind of evidence that is far more objective than morphology alone. These insights into the evolution of novelty strengthen aspects of Darwin's original ideas that some have found most difficult to grasp.

How could we make progress on questions involving the evolution of form without a scientific understanding of how form is generated in the first place? [By the 1970s] population genetics had succeeded in establishing the principle that evolution is due to changes in genes, but this was a principle without an example. No gene that affected the form and evolution of any animal had been characterized. New insights in evolution would require breakthroughs in embryology.

… these observations indicate that there is no biological need for nearly identical genes at the amino acid level, or even at the DNA level, in different species. Numerous amino acid sequences, and even numerous DNA sequences, are equally capable of performing the same function. Yet, what we see time and again (across whole genomes!) are nearly identical genes, with a few (often shared) differences – exactly what speciation events would be expected to produce.

…while errors made by human scribes tend preserve a meaning of some kind (even if it is an altered meaning), DNA replicating enzymes do not check to see if meaning (i.e. function) is preserved as they copy. (The functional check for a DNA sequence will come later as that particular organism develops (or not) and reproduces (or not). In other words, natural selection is the check for “meaning” for a DNA sequence).

With a high-school level understanding of science and theology, I was convinced by this "either-or" argument and, to my knowledge, became the first Young Earth Creationist in my local Nazarene church. I knew the enemy and the enemy had a name. It was Evolution.

After we both exhaled some relieved laughter, I whispered, "I believe God created the world and holds it together. Just how he did that is up for debate, but whatever conclusions you come to about the earth's origins, God did it. Okay?"

We’re pleased to introduce the first official commercials for BioLogos, produced by Ryan Pettey of Satellite Pictures and featuring BioLogos vice president Jeff Schloss, philosopher Alister McGrath, and theologian NT Wright.

Science rejoices in the rational accessibility of the physical world and uses the laws of nature to explain particular occurrences in cosmic and terrestrial history, but it is unable of itself to offer any reason why these laws take the particular (anthropically fruitful) form that they do, or why we can discover them through mathematical insight.

What shall we make of all this? We need to be cautious about what things in nature we attribute to the Fall. It’s too easy for us to take our conception of how we would make a good creation and assume that’s how God made it. By studying God’s creation, we might learn that some of our ideas are wrong.

Astronomy and geology give us clear evidence that the fundamental laws of nature have remained unchanged since the beginning of creation. Whatever the effects of the Fall, they do not seem to have changed the basic laws of physics.