Prehoda's Goof: Mutational Fitness Effects Cannot Be Predicted

Last February when we looked into the claims of University of Oregon biochemist Kenneth Prehoda, we saw him pounding Darwin's pulpit with righteous fervor. He practically shouted that you could get instant animals by chance. His team's discovery of a mutation that seemed to allow proteins to interact more easily in a choanoflagellate became the springboard for a sermon envisioning all the marvels of multicellularity without intelligent design.

Indeed, a breathless reporter from the Washingt...