In the context of the present discussion with an interlocutor about cancer and intelligent design, it strikes me that it’s more helpful — rather than straining for an analogy between cancer and evolution — to directly test the basis of evolution itself. Nothing is more basic than proteins, those “wonderful molecules that do almost all the work of molecular life,” as protein chemist Douglas Axe says in a brief video conversation.

Author of Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, Dr. Axe and his colleagues have tested protein evolution. Identifying a “big problem” and a “little problem,” they tested the easier one — easier, that is, for evolution to accomplish, you would think. Yet evolution failed.

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