Three years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts about how scientists at the University of Oregon reconstructed the 450-million-year history of a protein. You can read the posts here, here, and here. What was particularly elegant about the study was how the scientists recreated the ancestral protein as it existed over 400 million years ago, to see how it functioned. Then they pinpointed the mutations that transformed the protein, shifting it from an old function to a new one.
Recently, the scientists tried to run their experiment backwards. They tried to turn the new protein back into the old one. And they failed. In that failure, they’ve discovered something important. They argue that when it comes to evolution, you can’t go home again.
In today’s issue of the New York Times, I describe this new research, which was recently published in Nature. (Check out the web page of the lead author, Joseph Thornton, for pdf’s of all his papers on this paleoprotein project.)
September 29th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Great story, Carl.
It was good that you were able to include the larger implication, if only briefly at the end: that “the biology we ended up with was not inevitable.” Even if a particular mutation would be advantageous, other random mutations could determine whether an organism could take advantage of it.
As Stephen Jay Gould was fond of emphasizing, the history of life is contingent, depending on random events. Many people think this is obvious, but some claim that evolution was set in motion with the certainty of eventually producing us. This result is further evidence that that this view is not compatible with how unguided evolution really works.
September 29th, 2009 at 10:37 am
this means star trek voyager has lied to us?
October 2nd, 2009 at 5:00 pm
[...] random walk of sorts October 2, 2009 — Richard The Continuing Adventures of the Blind Locksmith: You Can’t Get There From Here: [Via The Loom] Three years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts about how scientists at the [...]
October 7th, 2009 at 2:10 am
Wed, Oct 7. Today’s NY Times has an editorial based on Carl’s summary of Thompson’s Nature paper.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/opinion/07wed4.html?ref=opinion
October 11th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
When it comes to evolution, you are always home. Lotsa oxygen? You grow, oxygen’s depleted? You shrink. On the way down, you pass the point you started from like a yo-yo.
We know so little that the more we learn, we realize how much more there is to know. Inferrential statements contradict scientific pursuits by their very nature.