Plant scientists at Purdue University have made a surprising discovery—a plant containing a template, or a master genetic blueprint, that can correct defective genes inherited from its parents.

What is shocking is that the discovery violates traditional laws of genetic inheritance by somehow acquiring not just the chance arrangement of DNA through the standard combination of parental genes but also a copy of earlier uncombined DNA sequences from its ancestors—something deemed impossible by biologists. Equally surprising is the fact that the correcting template or agent, whatever it is, is hidden and not represented in the plant's current DNA pattern.

"The finding implies that some organisms may contain a cryptic backup copy of their genome that bypasses the usual mechanisms of heredity," says New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade. ". . . The discovery also raises interesting biological questions—including whether it gets in the way of evolution, which depends on mutations changing an organism rather than being put right by a backup system."He continues: "The finding poses a puzzle for evolutionary theory because it corrects mutations, which evolution depends on as generators of novelty [new features]" ("Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Its Flawed Genes," March 23).

"If you take this mutant [plant] Arabidopsis, which has two copies of the altered gene," says Robert Pruitt, the discoverer of the phenomenon, "let it seed and then plant the seeds, 90 percent of the offspring will look like the parent, but 10 percent will look like the normal grandparents. Our genetic training tells us that's just not possible. This challenges everything we believe . . .

"It seems that these [mutant gene]-containing plants keep a cryptic copy of everything that was in the previous generation, even though it doesn't show up in the DNA, it's not in the chromosome. Some other type of gene sequence information that we don't really understand yet is modifying the inherited traits" (as quoted by Susan Steeves, "Plants Defy Mendel's Inheritance Laws, May Prompt Textbook Changes," Purdue News Services).

Scientists do not yet know how many living organisms contain this master backup copy, but the search is now on. Evolutionists will be hard pressed to explain how such a mechanism could have been created in a Darwinian step-by-step fashion and inherited not from parents, but from grandparents or distant ancestors.