From ScienceDaily:
Historians can only speculate on what might have been, but a team of evolutionary biologists studying ancient proteins has turned speculation into experiment. They resurrected an ancient ancestor of an important human protein as it existed hundreds of millions of years ago and then used biochemical methods to generate and characterize a huge number of alternative histories that could have ensued from that ancient starting point.
Tracing these alternative evolutionary paths, the researchers discovered that the protein – the cellular receptor for the stress hormone cortisol – could not have evolved its modern-day function unless two extremely unlikely mutations happened to evolve first. These “permissive” mutations had no effect on the protein’s function, but without them the protein could not tolerate the later mutations that caused it to evolve its sensitivity to cortisol. In screening thousands of alternative histories, the researchers found no alternative permissive mutations that could have allowed the protein’s modern-day form to evolve. The researchers describe their findings June 16, online in Nature.
“This very important protein exists only because of a twist of fate,” said study senior author Joe Thornton, PhD, professor of ecology & evolution and human genetics at the University of Chicago. “If our results are general – and we think they probably are – then many of our body’s systems work as they do because of very unlikely chance events that happened in our deep evolutionary past,” he added.
And we know they are “chance” events because … Oh wait.
This is a big debate in origin of life. Some say there is a law of nature that brings life about; others say it is chance. For a handy summary of the present stalemate, go to The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (origin of life)