Mutations don’t add value, they detract and diminish functionality. Yet another ‘research paper’, funded by the cult of Darwin and prosecuted by the faithful, has reached what is for them, this disappointing conclusion.
5/19/2022: Science just published a related paper by Park et al., “Epistatic drift causes gradual decay of predictability in protein evolution,”
Science 19 May 2022, Vol 376, Issue 6595, pp. 823-830, DOI: 10.1126/science.abn6895.
The authors cannot point to any innovations, benefits or improvements wrought by mutations.
The effects of mutations were highly contingent on a dense network of epistatic interactions.
There were mutations with both short and long memory length, but the average rate of epistatic change was generally constant. The landscape of potential and actual interactions is thus constantly shifting at a rate that can be known, but the direction of the change is contingent on evolutionary history and becomes unpredictable after a time.
“We’re showing that in order for us to have a full understanding of how genes actually behave,” says Nguyen Ba, “the combinations of mutations are likely to be very important.”
His own paper and research points out the obvious, that mutations do not act alone, are involved in ‘epistatic’ or multi-level changes and would need mathematical improbability involving many coordinated changes to derive a functional improvement. Not one single experiment or piece of research supports such a supposition. Not one. Hand-waving, with allusions to ‘selection’ and stuff happens is anti-science.