The rapid evolvability of chemical diversity in terpene synthases were demonstrated through processes akin to both Darwinian gradualism and saltation: some mutational pathways show steady, additive changes, whereas others show drastic jumps between contrasting product specificities with single mutational steps. Further, a metric was devised to describe the chemical distance of mutational steps to derive a chemical-based phylogeny relating sequence variation to chemical output. These examples establish SCOPE as a standardized method for the construction of synthetic gene libraries from close or distantly related parental sequences to identify functional novelty among the encoded proteins.