Below if a nice video about our modern understanding of evolution.

I especially enjoyed the comments from Sean Carroll (according to Michael Ruse, “Of all the scientists in the world today, there is no one with whom Charles Darwin would rather spend an evening than Sean Carroll.”):

So what this means is in some ways, some sense, evolution is a simpler process than we first thought. When you think about all of the diversity of forms out there, we first believed this would involve all sorts of novel creations, starting from scratch, again and again and again. We now understand that, no, that evolution works with packets of information and uses them in a new and different ways, and new and different combinations, without necessarily having to invent anything fundamentally new, but new combinations.

My, that’s a pretty radical change in the way we view evolution. The old way was far less friendly to teleology and also failed to prepare scientists for the more accurate understanding of evolution, an understanding that is now much more friendly to teleology.

But how so?

1. We’ve always known evolution has occurred thanks to the fossil record, sequence data, etc. The question has been about the mechanism of evolution. Take the old view that the eye evolved 40 times independently. This was a great illustration of the minimal needs and impressive power of natural selection. All you needed was some type of generic, vague, function (vision) and RM & NS, which cares only if something, anything, “works,” would find a way, any way, to bring something into existence that would elicit the function. But now, what happens, for example, if we take the highly conserved protein Pax6 away? Without it, is there good reason to think the blind watchmaker would easily craft eyes?

2. The “genetic toolkit” is what facilitates evolution, meaning that the toolkit itself must be explained in a way where evidence of evolution-made-possible-by-the-toolkit is questionably extrapolated to explain the toolkit.

3. The new view of evolution is already beginning to import engineering concepts and terminology (I’ll write about this some day), helping us to better visualize evolution as programmed and programming.

4. The new view of evolution would much easier to guide/channel via front-loading, rendering front-loading increasingly plausible.