I read quite a bit of scientific material. Not the deep research papers; those days are long gone and my knowledge is too out of date to follow along with immensely detailed analyses of ever more intricate experiments. What I do read is the commentary for the intelligent layman: the specialist science journalism in, for example, New Scientist, Science, Scientific American, Quanta, and various other places elsewhere online.

I don’t read everything – there isn’t time, and anyway there are subjects like climate change, extra-terrestrial life and artificial intelligence which bore me rigid.
[No I didn’t say they aren’t important, or don’t exist; I just said they’re not things I can enthuse over.]

The more I read, the more incredulous I become that anything in the living world works at all – let alone that it could have evolved from nothing, however long the timescales involved.

Apart from the way in which the SARS-CoV-2 virus seems to work, what brought this home to me most recently was and article in The Scientist about left-handed DNA. You see the normal DNA which makes up all our genes has a helical structure which twists in a right-handed direction. And the way that works is gobsmacking enough.

But DNA can twist the other way (left-handed) to form Z-DNA. This has been known for some time, but it is now thought it may have a role in cancer and autoimmune diseases. Even more bizarre is that short sections of normal DNA can flip to Z-DNA and this obviously has a major control on how the whole of the transcription process (which turns DNA code into proteins) works (or doesn’t work) – and that may be important for the prevention of autoimmune diseases or the growth of cancer.

It is fiendishly complex, and yet only one tiny piece in the corner of the jigsaw puzzle which is eukaryote metabolism. I remember when I was a postgrad student (45 years ago) having a huge A1 (maybe bigger) poster full of the (then known) metabolic pathways in tiny print. It was gobsmacking, and totally unmemorable, then and has since been shown to be many times more complex.

The way the living world works – from grass, to rabbit, to fox, and to you yourself – is absolutely incomprehensible and incredible. I can quite see why some people cannot believe in evolution and insist that the whole must be divine design. I don’t agree with that, but that makes it no less brain-addling.