“The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain
In its most recent issue The Quarterly Review of Biology has published a review by myself of laboratory evolution experiments of microbes going back four decades. The paper (entitled “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’”) is available as a free pdf on my Lehigh University website (http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/pdf/Behe/QRB_paper.pdf). The chief question asked in the paper is the following: does evolution more often proceed by endowing an organism with a new function, by taking away an existing function, or by tweaking (modifying) a pre-existing function? Darwin himself realized that evolution did not always have to proceed by gain-of-function events. For example, in some of his writings he described male barnacles that had undergone gross simplification. For most Read More ›