This reminds me of those evolution experiments where they would take a bacteria that couldn't metabolize citric acid and put it in a citric acid environment and then freeze / sequence samples every few generations and see how long it would take for them to develop the mutations required to metabolize citric acid and they woudl find that the precursors to this ability was already latent in generations prior to the adaptation showing up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...

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adastra22 an hour ago | parent [-]

I'm confused. Isn't that the way it would have to be?

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lunar_mycroft 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

(Going from memory here)

No, it's possible that there's a single gene that would do it, meaning a single mutation would enable it. But that's not what happened here. Instead, there were multiple genes involved, with some of the necessary mutations occurring long before the other.

	▲	vidarh a minute ago \| parent [-]
		But when multiple genes were necessary, you would still expect the whole chain to be present in those who eventually got the final mutation, or it wouldn't have done anything. So it is still what you would expect.