Progress after the Royal Society conference?

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@lee_merrill

@Rumraket

@lee_merrill

@Roy

I’m right not to believe you, because your next post describes an experimental attempt at reversing the alteration of two residues - which is selecting the mutations to look for ahead of time

Well, fine

“Fine”?

So just to be clear here, you acknowledge that the double reversal experiment is irrelevant to evolution?

So you understand that evolution is actually a highly contingent process, and what matters is that new beneficial mutations are found, not whether someone had specified them in advance and were “waiting for them”?

Well, you trimmed my response, though I subsequently admitted that I misspoke. I meant that knock-out experiments are fine, not that selecting mutations to look for ahead of time is fine

Which is what you are doing when you search for two mutations which in combination renders a gene nonfunctional and where no other mutations can compensate, deliberately insert those two mutations, and then wait for those two and only those two to reverse.

That IS to select mutations to look for ahead of time. Then you have deliberately engineered a scenario where only that specific double reversal can restore function. You are now waiting for a pre-specified result where no other options can compensate for them.

Not a particularly interesting or informative experiment with respect to evolution in general. The only sort of scenario for which such an experiment can be informative would be one where you know that some adaptation could only have evolved by such a pathway, and where no other alternatives existed at the time.