In today’s video, Dr. Rick Colling states that evolution is not merely the imposition of death and destruction and survival of the fittest. Rather, it is about second chances.

Despite their somewhat mysterious nature, transposon sequences make up a staggering 45% or more of our genome. They are the perfect parasites: using their host to provide resources, they maintain a “lifestyle” so simple that replication is essentially their only feature.

In this series, we reexamine the claim made by Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe to have found a limit to “Darwinian” evolution in light of recent results from the laboratory of Richard Lenski.

We live in exciting times for a geneticist: more and more genomes are being sequenced, and more and more novel genome-wide analyses are being performed to shed light on what all those newly-determined sequences mean.

Written by BioLogos Fellow of Biology Dennis Venema, this series of posts is intended as a basic introduction to the science of evolution for non-specialists.