Is There Devolution?

Can evolution run backward?  Scientists say no.

...But, until recently, scientists had never really tested the biological law — first proposed in 1905 — that evolution couldn’t run in reverse. No one expects whole organisms to mutate back into their evolutionary antecedents. But what about the proteins we’re made up of? Under the right circumstances, can they find their way back in time?
The answer, it turns out, is no.
A University of Oregon research team has tried, in essence, to return a protein — called a glucocorticoid receptor — to one of its ancestral states by reversing the mutations that produced the modern version of the receptor. They discovered that the mutations happened in two stages — two separate groups of mutations. The trouble, they report in the current issue of Nature, was that each separate cluster of mutations produced a dead receptor, no matter which one was chosen first. In other words, there was no way the protein could select a preferable state that would lead it, in nature, toward its ancestral form.
Evolution opens gateways into the future. But it appears to close them — firmly — behind it as well.

Inserted from <NY Times>
But sometimes scientists are just plain wrong.  Devolution does exist, and here’s the proof!