The arc of evolutionary genetics may be irreversible

One of the banes of modern life is the stack of papers in one's "to-read" list. I guess that goes to show how cushy modern life is, as what sort of complaint is that? In any case, I began to consider this after reading Joe Thornton's magisterial response to Michael Behe's giddy excitement over his most recent paper, An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution. Thornton dispatches Behe's muddled misconceptions with economy and precision, but after reading the paper, as opposed to cogent summaries such as Carl Zimmer's in The New York Times I'm even more at a loss as to how Behe arrived at the conclusions he did as to the paper's significance (please read the paper, available on Thornton's lab website, and then try and make sense of what Behe is asserting) . But at least Michael Behe prompted me to push the paper to ...