Brilliant people,
working in the highest developed laboratory,
using the highest technology,
through a series of experimental processes guided by brilliant individuals,
determining through process of elimination which way to proceed,
have done something that you expect people to believe happened by chance alone????
As I understand it the brilliance here is not in producing a mutation but in finding how and what to change in which genes to obtain a specific mutation. Regards.
This time around, they looked to nature for direction!
In previous studies researchers had taken the well-studied hox genes, mutated them or expressed them in places where expression is normally not found and were able to generate mutant flies with extra wings, legs, or fewer wings, legs, different segmentation patterns, etc. etc.
Okay, so, they could "artificially" do this in the lab, but the real question is, what direction did nature take? So they pulled out the sequence of a creature ancestral to the fly. A creature with a different segmentation pattern and many more legs. Using that gene in the fly they uncovered something surprising: flies have evolved a supressing function of the ancient gene.
This is not laboratory designed. This is discovering nature.