EVOLUTION ELECTROSTATED

Evolutionary biology has emerged from its 19th-century state; the image of naturalists collecting butterflies and museum curators dusting fossils has faded. Evolution is now widely perceived and appreciated as the organizing principle at all levels of life. This principle so pervades research that the evolutionary underpinning of many experimental approaches is unstated. For example studies in the developmental genetics of fruit flies led to the discovery of genes that control development in all segmented organisms. Protein alignments are used to identify conserved amino acid residues that are potentially important to function. Even the hierarchical use of model organisms from bacteria to humans in biomedical testing and research is implicitly based on recognition that the same building blocks underlie all life and that levels of increasing similarity are nested.