The statement was "…via mutations in non-coding stretches of DNA, a process thought to be virtually impossible until recently"

a) Francois Jacob in 1977 is n = 1 from 32 years ago. Is there evidence that most people thought this right up until recently?

b) Jacob is talking about randomly assembling amino acids. That's not what happened in this case. Basically, the other apes have a few indels that we don't have which makes the sequences non-coding.

My first guess is that these were genes in the past, inactivated to pseudogenes in a distant ancestor (since they lack introns, presumably processed pseudogenes), then reactivated in humans through relatively minor mutations.

It's very cool, and your article does a good job. So, again, it was only a very minor point.

“The probability that a functional protein would appear de novo by random association of amino acids is practically zero.”

Francois Jacob, 1977