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I think this goes back to the concept of controlled systems we talked about in class when discussing Darwin's "On the Origin of Species". Darwin had said that there was reason behind the chance in natural selection but our ignorance prevents us from seeing the reason. In this synthetic system there should be little chance as the scientists have removed as many variables as possible and are working with prokaryotic cells. Were this carried out on a eukaryotic cell, the increase in variables might produce some interesting chaotic results.