In my new Dissection column over at Wired, I take a look at a remarkable new experiment on E. coli. Scientists randomly rewired the network of genes that control much of the microbe’s activity and found that it generally just kept humming along.

One thing worth adding…in an accompanying commentary, Matthew Bennett and Jeff Hasty at UCSD write,

This conclusion also flies in the face of the popular misconception among opponents of the evolutionary theory, who believe that the genetic code is irreducibly complex. For instance, advocates of ‘intelligent design’ compare the genome to modern engineered machines such as integrated circuits and clocks, which will cease to function if their internal design is altered. Although sometimes it is instructive