"Nostril moving gene"?

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Jerry Coyne wrote a blog dissing Dr Lynn Margulis for allegedly dissing evolution. In the blog Jerry said:

A gene moving the nostrils of an ancestral whale atop its head, so that they become a blowhole enabling it to breathe while partly submerged, will become fixed.

I have seen beavers and pinnipeds stay mostly submerged and breathe through nostrils at the end of their snouts. Ever watch alligators and crocs swimming? How about when they just float with only their nostrils, located at the tip of their snout, exposed?

But anyway, what is this gene? Do pinnipeds and beavers have it but just in a different configuration? What about hippos?

The point is we should be able to take one of those embryos and mutate the gene to see if we can get it to develop a blowhole at the top of its head.

OR take a cetacean embryo and try to move it back to the tip of the snout.

In a related note:

Is Sustained Macroevolutionary Progress Possible?:

Microevolutionary change has been demonstrated with closed-system biological experiments (Papadopoulos) and in computer models (Ray). Sustained macroevolutionary progress (SMP) that can lead from prokaryotes to people has not. In 1988, Ernst Mayr wrote, "Unfortunately, the genetics of microevolutionary processes has been unable to provide a full explanation of macroevolution." Today, a score of sequenced genomes later, W. Ford Doolittle observes, "Many eukaryotic genes ...seem to have come from nowhere."

Two recent insights point to a new possible explanation for the apparent SMP on Earth. The first insight is that microorganisms from space may have seeded life on Earth; the second is that horizontal gene transfer plays a major role in evolution. The new possible explanation is "strong panspermia," according to which microorganisms from space provide the new genes necessary for SMP on Earth. Thus, if the planet is an open biological system, perhaps what we call macroevolutionary progress is actually the incremental development of pre-existing, highly evolved cosmic life.

Strong panspermia accords well with several phenomena that have troubled standard Darwinism, including life’s rapid start on Earth, punctuated equilibrium, convergent evolution, the ubiquity of certain master control genes, and the fact that many genes appear older, by sequence analysis, than they should be according to the fossil record.

But when pursued to its logical conclusion, the theory conflicts with most versions of the Big Bang and with customary Western thought, which hold that life cannot simply descend from prior life, highly evolved or not, ad infinitum. However, until SMP is demonstrated, this objection is overburdened.

If SMP is possible, closed-system experiments should be able to demonstrate it. Success in biological experiments would be decisive, but computer models should be able to get results faster. A positive result would give the existing paradigm much-needed confirmation. Of course, before results could be interpreted, a way to measure and verify SMP would have to be established — a worthy task in itself.

But if SMP is not possible, we would not have to abandon science altogether, as participants on both sides in the "darwinism versus creationism" debate suggest. Instead, in a role reversal, cosmology would have to accommodate a fundamental biological principle.

The issue is important. Let’s conduct experiments to learn if SMP is possible.

Time and loss of function mutations just ain't going to "get 'er done"...