In April I was asked by the BBC’s science magazine, BBC Focus, to provide them with a short essay identifying and discussing some major unanswered questions in evolutionary biology. (This is part of their regular “Questions at the Frontiers of Science” series.)  I identified three, and at my request the magazine has kindly put one of them online for my readers. The question is “Was the course of evolution inevitable?”, and you can read my answer here.

In the next two days I’ll post the other two questions and my answers; these are available only in the print magazine but I’d like to give readers to have a chance to see them. Alternatively, since there was some editing of what I submitted, if you email me I’ll send you a Word document with my original questions and answers.

One issue that I didn’t tackle was the thorny problem of how the first organism (or replicator) came into being. There’s not much to be said here yet: we have lots of hypotheses but are approaching the answer only slowly. (Do note, though, that studies of the origin of life, or “abiogenesis” aren’t formally part of evolution, which takes over only when a replicator has come into existence.) And even if we can produce life in the laboratory under conditions approximating those of the early Earth, that only shows us that it could have happened, not how it happened. Still, such a demonstration—and I think we’ll see one in the next 50 years—would go a long way toward blunting one of the few arguments left in the creationist arsenal. For it would dispel the main creationist claim about this issue: that there’s no way life could have originated spontaneously without the help of God.