Guy Threepwood
Well-Known Member
- Oct 16, 2019
- 1,143
- 73
- 53
- Country
- United States
- Gender
- Male
- Faith
- Non-Denom
- Marital Status
- Married
This statement is counterfactual.
A very cool experiment, performed by Yuuki Hayashi et al. that I will indicate as "The Rugged Landscape Experiment" shows this.
It has been mentioned earlier in this thread that there is a genetic "switch" in the DNA before the DNA part that codes for a protein. This switch can be activated by the a hormone, a the metabolic starting material or any other signal molecule. Yuuki Hayashi et al. performed a cool experiment: they stripped the coding part of the DNA of a virus that codes for the protein that grants access to a E. coli batcteria and replaced it with a random stretch of DNA. After 20 generations the virus had increased its infectivity by 1.7*10^7 compared with the starting generation.
This shows that gain of function does NOT develop by loss of funtion - all function was already lost - but indeed by increasing fitness of the coded protein.
source to the original papers:
Experimental Rugged Fitness Landscape in Protein Sequence Space - PMC
The fitness landscape in sequence space determines the process of biomolecular evolution. To plot the fitness landscape of protein function, we carried out in vitro molecular evolution beginning with a defective fd phage carrying a random ...www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
"they stripped the coding part of the DNA of a virus that codes for the protein that grants access to a E. coli batcteria and replaced it with a random stretch of DNA"
Right, so introducing a random sequence of DNA broke a specific function... That's exactly my point.
Once again breaking functions can often improve fitness, no argument there.
But the same problem remains, you cannot macro-evolve a bacteria into a human being by simply breaking previously active functions.
You need the exact opposite phenomena than your example to occur.
Upvote
0