The Cambrian Explosion Has Just Gone Nuclear | Evolution News

[Dan_Eastwood]

@Art

Nick, OTOH, has been making excellent headway on a most interesting and important problem, doing exactly what the ID vanguard has been insisting can’t be done, and should not be done.

Thou I am honored, I’m pretty sure this is the comment @Art meant to link.

While the DI write books

I don’t know but my guess is that they intend to do ancestor reconstruction of several different states in the evolution of the flagellum (the “re-engineering” part), and then from those inferred ancestral systems try to re-evolve descendant systems with new functions. I see Matzke is already co-author with Baker on a paper using that approach to understand how ion-selectivity evolves (how the flagellum can evolve by mutations and selection to switch between sodium ions, or protons, to power movement):

Ancestral Sequence Reconstructions of MotB Are Proton-Motile and Require MotA...