Wheel of Fortune: New Work by Thornton's Group Supports Time-Asymmetric Dollo's Law

In the June 2011 issue of PLOS Genetics the laboratory of University of Oregon evolutionary biologist Joseph Thornton published "Mechanisms for the Evolution of a Derived Function in the Ancestral Glucocorticoid Receptor," the latest in their series of papers concerning the evolution of proteins that bind steroid hormones (Carroll et al., 2011). In earlier laboratory work they had concluded that a particular protein, which they argued had descended from an ancestral, duplicated gene, ...