You're assuming it happened all in one go. Instead, the protein was probably inserted into a germ cell by a retrovirus, and then was available in descendants as grist for further evolution, eventually being incorporated into the placenta.

The eye evolved in much the same way, a bit at a time. It didn't just turn up one day.

As for the virus/placenta thing, I recall reading a similar thing about wasps, though I couldn't provide any citations, that the method by which a wasp stops the immune system of a host (such as a catepiller) from attacking its eggs/larvae is viral in origin, and remarkably similar in some ways to the way a mother's body doesn't attack an organism that in any other circumstances would read as a parasite.

Interesting stuff.

Strange that an uncoordinated, random walk of mutations would keep a profound number of changes in tact, ready for some other random bit to take place and it all just "fall into place". The eye didn't evolve. Hearing didn't evolve. Smell didn't evolve.

This line of thinking is just hopeful projections of desired causality.

The profound number of changes are in tact only if those changes aid in the natural selection of the organism against selection pressure.

Such changes are replicated more successfully (more offspring) making the change/mutation more resilient to disappearing from the genepool.

Over time any organism that's living/thriving is going to have a lot of these mutations stacked on top of one another in a resilient way(size of population with the same mutations). Any mutations that are disadvantageous to natural selection and proliferation are weeded out of the genepool (go extinct)

> The eye didn't evolve. Hearing didn't evolve. Smell didn't evolve.

I don't know if you're being somehow pedantic for some definition of "eye" or "evolve", or if you're one of those "Intelligent Design" creeps.

I think people are misled because it's difficult to really grasp the very high dimensionality of the space ("morphospace") in which organisms sit. There are many, many directions for incremental change to go in, and evolution just needs there to be an improving step at each point along the path. In a low dimensional space it would be easy to get stuck in local minima, but as the number of dimensions increases that's harder and harder.

Evolution can be very easy given time. Trees independently evolved from non-tree plants something like 100 times, for example.

People, capable of pondering life’s great mysteries, are going to place faith into something, only difference is if they accept it as a faith or argue their faith into fact. I think this makes many here uncomfortable.

Sorry but I believe in science and evolution, not science fiction. Just making up stories that viruses can create new organs in other organisms and also some get intertwined in the reproduction so that next generations can get the same organs is creationism mythology.

That's not what the article asserts; you're complaining about a strawman.

It asserts that some virus genes made it into our genome, and that some of those were useful in the eventual evolution of the placenta.

That mechanism is well documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus

Going from infecting an organ to getting replicated via meiosis and being transmitted such that it fits neatly into our chromosomes is entirely different things and different pathways. It's impossible. Exogenous viruses affected organs is real and even intertwining in our DNA, like herpes. But the idea that it can create new organs or somehow get into our sperm and egg in order to self propagate into another organism that doesn't have those genes is ridiculous.

Again, you're arguing against something that wasn't asserted. The article doesn't say some virus infected a human and bam, placenta, next generation. It says some viral infections gave us individual proteins that wound up handy later.

> the idea that it can ... somehow get into our sperm and egg in order to self propagate into another organism... is ridiculous

Again, that's precisely what endrogenous retroviruses do. From my link:

"Rarely, retroviral integration may occur in a germline cell that goes on to develop into a viable organism. This organism will carry the inserted retroviral genome as an integral part of its own genome—an "endogenous" retrovirus (ERV) that may be inherited by its offspring as a novel allele. Many ERVs have persisted in the genome of their hosts for millions of years."

No "real" evidence? There's plenty of evidence, you just reject it for some reason.

What evidence have you considered to the contrary? Have you ever turned the chessboard around to look at this from the other side of the table? Most people I've spoken to who have strong feelings about this topic have only ever looked at it from one side properly.

The GP is skeptical that one can go from A, a chance interaction between two systems, through a continuous uninterrupted, robust, repeatable chain of unguided interactions, and arrive at Z, the placenta. An organ whose function and elegance is unrivalled by anything we as a species have made with logic and thought. And why should he not be skeptical, everything we've practically achieved in terms of technological progress has been the product of mind and intelligence, any claims to be able to do the same thing without that should be scrutinised very closely.

> unguided interactions

I detect a creationist.

> An organ whose function and elegance is unrivalled by anything we as a species have made with logic and thought.

Before modern medicine, it and the rest of this elegant system had a roughly ~2-3 in 100 chance of killing the mother in any particular pregnancy.

you are... definitely not a biologist, lol.