You’ll have to wait til yesterday is here
In a kind of evolutionary bridge-burning, once a gene has morphed into its current state, the road back gets blocked, new research suggests. So there’s no easy way to turn back.
“Evolutionary biologists have long been fascinated by whether evolution can go backwards,” said study researcher Joe Thornton.
“But the issue has remained unresolved, because we seldom know exactly what features our ancestors had, or the mechanisms by which they evolved into their modern forms.”
Thornton’s team solved this problem by looking at evolution at the molecular level, where they could figure out the steps taken between the ancestral form of a protein and its successor.
