A correspondent wrote to us with an interesting question about evolution that arose in a discussion he had with a biologist:

My interlocutor made the claim that all the information necessary for metazoans was already present in protists. I said, “Even for eyes?” and he replied, “Yes — all the proteins you need for eyes are already there in single-celled organisms.” So, what do you think of that?

Fortunately, the question is easy to answer. The interlocutor’s claim is not accurate. Casey Luskin wrote a response on the subject here a few years ago:

• “Did the Origin of Animals Require New Genes?”

In fact, many new proteins are required. Dr. Luskin’s article describes a 2018 article in Nature Communications that quantifies the increase in information in different taxa. See, “Reconstruction of the ancestral metazoan genome reveals an increase in genomic novelty.”