ar, such fossils and other kinds of evidence tighten our conception of the evolutionary origin of this important group of insects.—Edward O. Wilson The discovery of the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953 extended the study of evolution to the most fundamental level. The sequence of the chemical bases in DNA both specifies the order of amino acids in proteins and determines which proteins are synthesized in which cells. In this way, DNA is the ultimate source of both change and continuity in evolution. The modification of DNA through occasional changes or rearrangements in the base sequences underlies the emergence of new traits, and thus of new species, in evolution. At the same time, all organisms use the same molecular codes to translate DNA base sequences into protein amino acid sequences. This uniformity in the genetic code is powerful evidence for the interrelatedness of living things, suggesting that all organisms presently alive share a common ancestor that can be traced back to the origins of life on earth. One common misconception among students is that individual organisms change their characteristics in response to the environment. In other words, students often think that the environment acts on individual organisms to generate physical characteristics that can then be passed on genetically to offspring. But selection can work only on the genetic variation that already is present in any new generation, and genetic variation occurs randomly, not in response to the needs of a population or organism. In this sense, as Francois Jacob has written, evolution is a "tinkerer, not an engineer."2 Evolution does not design new organisms; rather, new organisms emerge from the inherent genetic variation that occurs in organisms. Genetic variation is random, but natural selection is not. Natural selection tests the combinations of genes represented in the members of a species and allows to proliferate those ...
