Reverse evolution in real-time
Monday, January 12, 2009 - 14:07
in Paleontology & Archaeology
In his book, Wonderful World, Stephen Jay Gould writes about an experiment of 'replaying life's tape', wherein one could go back in time, let the tape of life play again and see if 'the repetition looks at all like the original'. Evolutionary biology tells us that it wouldn't look the same – the outcome of evolution is contingent on everything that came before. Now, scientists at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC) in Portugal, New York University and the University of California Irvine, provide the first quantitative genetic evidence of why this is so.
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