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I can't stress how much I need to read more Stephen J. Gould. I suppose many theorists suspected that something like complexity by subtraction could occur - but this is the first I've seen someone provide empirical support for it. As I said in the article, the only times I've seen adaptation for less complex structures discussed, it has always been for structures that lost their function over evolutionary time. For me, testing complexity by subtraction could completely change a lot of inherent assumptions about adaptation in the same way exaptation did.