 He studies the evolution of cis-regulatory elements (pieces of non-coding DNA) which help to regulate gene expression in developing embryos, using the fruit fly "Drosophila" as the model organism.He has won the Shaw Scientist Award and the Stephen Jay Gould Prize for his work.The book's title quotes from the last sentence of Charles Darwin's 1859 "The Origin of Species", in which he described the evolution of all living organisms from a common ancestor