A short news article in Molecular Systems Biology is another example of scientists discussing the controversy that doesn’t exist over irreducible complexity. In an article discussing how some molecular biologists increased the selectivity of certain enzymes for their substrates by inducing mutations, they conclude: “Finally, they assumed that the mutations were additive–that the effect on selectivity of combining two mutations could be predicted by adding the effect of each mutation done singly. With this assumption, it was straightforward to predict combinations of single mutations identified as controlling selectivity without decreasing the total productivity. The striking result of this design is that the simple additivity assumption was validated–the authors obtained several triple to quintuple mutants with nearly perfect selectivities for the Read More ›