No Going Back?

Breaking Dollo's Law Brings Home the Case for Creation

Published posthumously, Thomas Wolfe's 1940 novel, You Can't Go Home Again—considered by many to be his most significant work—explores how brutally unfair the passage of time can be. In the finale, George Webber, the story's protagonist, concedes that "You can't go back home" to family, childhood, familiar places, dreams, and old ways of life.

In other words, there's an irreversible quality to life. Call it the arrow of time.

Like Wolfe, most evolutionary biologists believe there is an irreversibility to life's history and the evolutionary process. In fact, this idea is codified in Dollo's Law, which states that an organism cannot...