In the latest episode of Secrets of the Cell, biochemist Michael Behe points out a fact about evolution that may surprise many viewers. We've been taught for the last hundred years or so that evolution is a process that creates more complex organisms from less complex ancestral forms.
The mechanism for this is genetic mutation coupled with natural selection, producing new genes with new functions.
Scientists over the last several decades, however, have made an awkward discovery. Most change that we see in organisms is a result of genes being broken or damaged. In other words, living things devolve rather than evolve. It appears that life devolves from greater complexity to less complexity, but if that's the case how did it come to be that there was greater complexity in the genome at the outset?
Behe leaves this question unanswered, and, in fact, chooses not to raise it, so the viewer will have to answer it for him or herself: