Exponential Life

Epigenetics Deepens the Mystery of Design

I was blown away when the scientist said it; my mind yelled, "What? That's crazy!" His topic was the famous, or maybe infamous, tiny friend living down in our lower digestive tract, Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria. He said that, on average, any given strain of E. coli shares about twenty percent of its core genes with any other E. coli bacterial strain. In other words, about eighty percent of its genome is different from that of any other strain!

One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that other information-carrying structures besides deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) may partly define the E. coli's...