Your Loss is Your Gain

Evolution isn't simply about the genes you gain. It's also about the genes you lose. The word loss has a painful, grieving sound to human ears, and so it can be hard to see how it can have anything to do with the rise of diversity and complexity in life. And until recently, evolutionary biologists didn't pay much attention to lost genes because they were preoccupied with the emergence of new ones. New genes, they found, can be produced in many ways. A gene can get accidentally duplicated, for example, and the copy can mutate, taking on a new function. Or pieces of two separate genes can get fused together, producing a new sort of protein. Or an old gene can get acquire a new switch that turns it on and off according to a different set of signals. As genomes of more and more species have been sequenced, scientists ...