I pick up science books because I want to exercise my brain, expose it to a thought process it's not used to. It's a yoga kind of exercise done in the hopes that I'll still remember my name when I'm 80, and more traditionally, the hope of learning something that contributes to my overall understanding of existence. Recently, I picked up Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean Carroll. I wanted to shout at everyone I talked to, “Hey, guess what I just learned,” not wait for an answer, and surge right into a semi-babbling mildly unscientific summary of what I'd read that day. Endless Forms is a summary of the developments in a new branch of science called Evolutionary Development or the almost cringingly hip Evo-Devo.

Evo-Devo examines the mechanisms and processes through which living things go from single celled embryos to multi-billion celled animals, plants and people, and how those mechanisms and processes reveal the grand process of evolution. Evolutionary biologists studied and manipulated genes and isolated and identified the causes of genetic mutations and applied those discoveries to evolutionary development. The discoveries of Evo-Devo blew my mind to dust. The following is a summary of my experience reading Endless Forms. Imagine the bolded statements are shouted in intellectual shock and the rest are the actions of my brain digesting what it just learned.

1. If you take the genes in a mouse used to make a mouse eye and put them on a fly's wing, the wing grows fly eyes: You would think that mouse-eye genes will always build a mouse eye and if you put them on a fly's wing they'll either build a mouse eye or create some mutated affront to nature, but they actually will build a perfectly normal fly's eye. This is because they are basically the same gene. They contain the command “build an eye.” When surrounded by mouse genes, they build a mouse eye. When surrounded by fly genes they build a fly eye. In fact the gene that commands “build an eye,” is the same for damn near everything that has eyes. The same goes for the genes that say “build an appendage” and “build a heart."

2. Insect wings evolved from gills: One of the primary processes of building animal forms is modulation and specialization; the repeating of similar parts throughout the animal and then specializing of those parts as nature demands. So when natural selection determined wings were more useful than gills, the genes specialized some of the gills and turned them into wings.

3. Most of the genes that ancient animals had are the same genes we (as in human beings) have now: There are breathtaking similarities between genes in various species, beyond the oft quoted human-chimpanzee genetic similarities, so much so that there are vast similarities between humans and fruit flies. The differences in form arise out of changes in the settings of “genetic switches.” Genetic switches are proteins that attach to stretches of DNA and affect where and when genes are expressed. There are a ton of them with a ton of possible combinations. So gene change isn't what changes animal form. Changes in genetic switches are.

4. Holy crap this is a lot like chaos theory: A process where slight changes at the beginning level results in nearly infinite diversity. A repetition of action leading to vastly complicated and beautiful patterns. A convergence of mathematical theories and the basic process of evolution.

5. DNA has dark matter: Astrological physicists discovered that there wasn't enough matter as we understand it in the universe to account for the big bang. So they concluded there's something called “dark matter” that makes up for the rest of the mass of the universe. We don't know what “dark matter” is or how to look for it, but, mathematically it has to be there. DNA, similarly has “dark genes;” long stretches of genes that seem to have purpose but whose purpose we can't figure out. It also has “noise” and “junk;” long stretches of DNA sequence that don't do anything at all.

6. Human brains evolved the same way as everything else: No matter how huge our brains are, they still evolved through the process of changes in genetic switches and not fundamental changes in the genes themselves. What built mice brains, built our brains.

7. Evolution is a damn near perfect idea: A basic set of materials that can produce millions of different forms without fundamentally changing. The repetition of fundamental forms (a head, a torso with a spine and four limbs for example) combined with extreme specialization (think the finches). Consistent. Coherent. Logical. Demonstrable.

Carroll can't keep himself out of the Creationism/Evolution debate, even though scientific findings haven't really had much bearing on it since Darwin himself got the fundamental fight started. His restraint in the issue is admirable and he deals with it by essentially throwing up his hands and saying, “Just fucking quit it with this Creation crap. I mean, you know, like, look at all this,” even quoting the great social and scientific pundit Lewis Black on the implications of the whole fossil thing in the debate.

Perhaps the most beautiful result of evolution is that it unifies every living thing on the planet. Sure we have giant brains and giant cars, but we got these brains (and thus these cars) the same way the zebras got their stripes or the fruit flies their wings. It was a simple process of evolution and natural selection. It just happened that the process developed brains capable of technology and humans happened to be the ones with the brains. The entire basis of our profound and abusive arrogance as a species is the delusion that we are above this system. The advances in understanding evolution (and proving it's true beyond all reasonable and even some unreasonable doubt) might finally show us our place on this world. We're constantly evolving animals in an ecosystem of endless forms.

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