Scientific Discovery is  Evolving

I was in New Zealand watching the albatross slowly landing at his nest. Smooth glider-shaped wings, a sharp beak, and a doughy facial expression. He had not touched land for two years, flying solitary at sea. Now he had navigated back to his nest where he met again with his lifelong mate.

How can such complexity of life simply be due to evolution through random mutations? Francois Jacob, Nobel Prizewinning scientist specializing in inheritance does not think so:

"The notion that evolution results exclusively from a succession of micro-events, from mutations, each occuring at random, is denied both by time and arithmetic. For the wheel of chance to come up step by step, sub-unit after sub-unit, with each of the several ten thousand protein chains needed to compose the body of a mammal would require far more time than the span generally attributed to the [age of the] solar system. . . .Evolution has become possible, only because genetic systems themselves have evolved.*" 

What Jacob is saying is that the process of evolution itself evolved. The theory of Natural Selection put forward by Darwin is shown to be the process at work in some situations such as in the finches of the Galapagos on the islands. But this is not the whole story of how the finches became finches in the first place. Scientists have expanded their understanding of the evolution of natural organisms since Darwin's day, going beyond it. So this unit is only a start. 

What this means about science is that our understanding of the natural world is fluid and limited. It is not the whole picture, ever. 

This also means that in order to do science well, scientists need to keep open to new ideas and new ways of looking at things. Francois Jacob was open, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discoveries**.