Reversibility Of Evolutionary Processes
Thursday, September 24, 2009 - 12:56
in Biology & Nature
An article in LiveScience entitled "Evolution Can't Go Backward" has highlighted an experiment done to determine whether a protein could be "unmutated" (i.e. returned to its original state) and regain its ancestral functions. The results indicated that this reversibility wasn't possible because of other mutational factors that occurred during the entire time interval rendering a return to a primordial form impossible1. This does raise an interesting question and suggests some possible misundertandings about what this actually means. read more