You don't have to break the pieces of the process. The usual way non-fatal significant mutations happen is a change to one copy of a gene of which multiple copies exist. Most genomes are highly redundant; there will be a dozen genes encoding a given protein. If one of them mutates to produce a new protein, there are still plenty producing the old one...and if the new one just happens to do something useful, the organism wins.


On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 2:21 AM, Richard Aiken <raikenclw@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 4:48 AM, <shadow@shadowgard.com> wrote:
Sorry, but the article actually says the exact opposite.

I was referring to the point made in "Darwin's Black Box" rather than in the linked article. 


Just because those steps don't do anything useful other than as part
of the Krebs cycle in the *current* organism doesn't mean they
weren't steps in some *other* process in ancestor organisms.

That was previously pointed out. Which - to me - doesn't seem to "move the target" all that much. You still have to break those ancestor processes (without killing the resulting organism) and then reassemble the pieces into the Krebbs Cycle. That strikes me as rather hard to do.

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