Self-guided evolution in mitochondrial proteins

Princeton University - Evolution's new wrinkle: proteins with cruise control provide new perspective

Scientists have found that there are some proteins that exhibit feedback mechanisms that mutate their genetic structure, suggesting that some organic material can have some efficacy in evolution over its own level of fitness. Scientists looking at proteins that ferry electrons across the membrane of mitochondria found that nearly all of them were operating at peak efficiency; after running a mathematical analysis this outcome was so unlikely to be random that another hypothesis emerged consistent with "Control Theory", a theory about how feedback mechanisms would work. This may create a new way of looking at evolution as 'evolutionary control'. Important to note that the style of argumentation appear to be correlational: the behavior of the proteins is consistent with the feedback model.