Biologists reaffirm that evolution cannot reverse itself_14896

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Fifteen years of studies have relied on these procedures to show that Dollos Law is frequently violated. But, they used what we found was faulty methodology, he added.
Boris Igic, assistant professor of biological sciences, and Emma Goldberg, a post-doctoral student in Igics University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) laboratory, became suspicious of those methods,You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login, which they also had used in evolutionary studies of plant fertilization.
They found the methods flawed, prompting them to examine the challenges to Dollos Law.
They used mathematical tools to refute two Dollo challenges which claimed certain animals regained traits such as winged flight and sexual reproduction, and say many other claims of regained complex traits should be re-evaluated.

Biologists reaffirm that evolution cannot reverse itself
But, over the past two decades,You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login, many biologists have challenged Dollos Law, often by using statistical tools to reconstruct trait evolution and ancestry by looking only at existing species and their present-day traits.
We used computer simulations to demonstrate that this methodology consistently gives incorrect results when the loss of a trait truly is irreversible, said Igic.
The law,You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login, which was put forward by 19th century Belgian paleontologist Louis Dollo, argued that once natural selection for a complex functional trait is relaxed, mutations that degrade the genes needed for the trait accumulate, and the sequence of mutations is unlikely to be exactly reversed.
Igic and Goldberg identified two problems with the challenges: a logical error in how the common ancestor of a group of organisms is treated mathematically,You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login, and a disregard for the likelihood that complex characters affect the chances either of speciation - the origin of new species - or of extinction.
The biologists suggest a better way of testing Dollos Law.
Washington, Dec 27 (ANI): Biologists have reaffirmed a century-old law that said evolution cannot reverse itself.
According to the researchers, Dollo was correct in saying that transitions between two character states are unidirectional. (ANI)
That means a species trait, once lost to the sands of time through evolution, can never be regained.