The Human Genome and Evolution

And where is the data being published? The HGP and other such exercises ar having their data published. Websites like Ensembl are making massive collated data sets available to everyone.Are you just saying that individual creationists working in research are contributing to this collated data, which I can totally accept, or that there is a concerted effort amongst the Creation science research institutes such as ICR to build large scale data sets to integrate into the wider scientific community, for which I can see absoloutely no evidence.TTFN,WKThis message has been edited by Wounded King, 06-30-2005 06:23 AM

Geology isn't really my field.The RATE data seems to be a pretty small collection of data from what is in the Humphreys' papers, not really comparable with even the data produced from a small scale microarray experiment let alone something like the HGP. Well it makes a difference if all the peers reviewing the work are themselves creationists. Such a limited form of 'peer-review' surely only leads to a somewhat incestuous situation and is never going to win the research wider scientific credibility. Do you mean that no one thinks that the data were actively manipulated, I'm sure that is the case. There seem to be some people who doubt the reliability of the results however raising issues of contamination, misclassification of samples and general applicability of the experimental results to the corresponding natural situation.TTFN,WK

Now there is a slippery concept.Lets hope it is more relvant than the papers the ID proponents regularly trot out to bolster their claims that ID related work is being published mainstream.TTFN,WK

What do you mean by '*completely* unique'? Are you suggesting that these genes have no homologues outside of the fly/mosquito? How can you possibly know that simply by comparing 2 genomes, you would have to compare all of the closely related genomes of both species before you could justifiably say that any gene is '*completely* unique'.The current comparisons of the genomes identify about 1437 proteins in Anopheles and 2570 in Drosophila with no homologues in any of the other species whose genomes have been fully sequenced (Zdobnov, et al., 2002). But even this does not show that these proteins are '*completely* unique'.TTFN,WK

In some respects certainly, but there are a lot of even more similar non-drosophilid flies out there still to be sequenced. That rather depend on where they turn up. If they turn up in other dipterans more closely related to drosophila than mosquitoes then I would say that you would stil have a relatively good case for divergence. If they turn up in some vertebrate then it would certainly require a pretty hefty bit of suspension of disbelief to think of it as anything other than convergence or maybe some bizzare instance of lateral gene transfer.TTFN,WK

This seems to be verging on the tautological. You can't argue that something came about by evolution unless you accept the possibility that evolution is possible.TTFN,WK

Well unless you have secretly sequenced the genomes of all 'fly' species you are making this statement based upon a very small sample, pretty much just Drosophila really. So your fly/mosquito specific genes are really only A. gambiae/D. melanogaster specific, to the best of our knowledge so far. This doesn't neccessarily follow. The 1000 'specific' genes need not be directly related to the gross morphological/ anatomical characteristics preserved in Amber.TTFN,WK

That doesn't seem to show any increases with time, in fact I can't see anything indicative of time anywhere in that data.I know what you mean, but in terms of time, you've got nothing. In fact in the only really meaningful measure of evolutionary time, i.e. generations, you might argue that those species with the longest evolutionary history have the least genes.TTFN,WK

Leaving aside the 'time' component, these data could only argue for increases in genomic content if both sides agreed that the starting point was a common ancestor. If TB is arguing that there were seperate ancestors for the Yeast Kind, bacteria kind, rodent kind etc..., then we don't have much counterargument based on this data. The difference in bacterial and human genomes only looks like the result of a process of increase if you accept that man evolved from something like a bacteria.TTFN,WKThis message has been edited by Wounded King, 07-11-2005 12:39 PM

I'm not sure that you do. Where is your time factor? In what way are the bacterial genomes that have been sequenced any 'younger' than the Human ones? Did you go back in your time machine to 1 billion years ago and scoop some up? Nope, because bacteria and yeast have massively shorter generation spans compared to humans, mice etc.... Lets look at a hypothetical example.We have an ancestor of the man kind with 60,000 genes and an ancestor of the bacterial kind also, for reasons of equality, with 60,000 genes. We assume that the bacteria have a generation time of 3 hours and that humans have a generation time of about 12 years. If each kind loses genes at an equivalent rate, say 1 gene every 1000 generations, you can see that after 100 years you are going to have a bacterial 'kind' with a distinctly reduced genome compared to the human 'kind'.So even allowing all ancestral kinds to have been produced de novo at the same instant you could see such a pattern as the result of gene loss, at least logically if not biologically.TTFN,WK

So you aren't a fan of obscure notions such as common descent then? I didn't have you pegged as a special creationist. I think there are a number of obligate parasites, not to mention endosymbionts, from which a case might be made but I would certainly agree that it is the exception rather than the rule. Well now you are making the same mistake that TB did a couple of posts ago and that Mick seemd to be making. A consistent morphology doesn't have to mean a consistent genotype. I would certainly expect a high degree of conservation in large number of developmental genes important in establishing morphology, but that still leaves the potential for a whole lot of genome for god to go hiding in, especially if it has all been handily lost beyond recall.Just consider the many possibilities inherent in having a large panel of genes whose only job is to repress the function of genes which are reqired for later morphological developments of a lineage rather than an individual.Genetic complexity need not be reflected in morphological complexity, although there certainly seems to be a correlation in those species that we find extant nowadays. I'm perfectly happy to assume that this trend holds good going back in evolutionary time, but I suspect that a number of creationists might not be. That is why I said I knew what he meant, but unfortunately he didn't say what he meant and a lot of the assumptions that inference is based on are going to be less than convincing to many creationists.TTFN,WKP.S. I'm not just trying to be difficult, honestly.

Well that is an issue bioinformaticians will need to work out for themselves. I personally don't see why you should assume you would find them in every other fly, unless you actually know what all of these genes do and that they are vital to specific functions of 'flyness'. Maybe not, but not finding them in other flies or finding only some of them in other flies would be directly relevant to the discussion. Meh, phenotypes! These specimens preserved in amber are rarely more than 100 MY old and the lineages of Drosophila and anopheles are estimated to have diverged 250 MYA leaving at least a 100 MY for the mosquito to have evolved a morphological phenotype effectively indistinguishable from a modern mosquito.TTFN,WK

I totally agree. I'm not sure where this idea that 'microevolution' and 'macroevolution' are somehow not real scientific terms came from. They may not be overused in the literature but that is probably because they are pretty general terms which cover a number of things. So if a paper is about speciation it will talk about speciation not 'macroeveolution', similarly a paper discussing the genetic basis of large scale morphological changes is more likely to talk about 'large scale morphological changes' rather than 'macroevolution'.It may simply be that the wide usage of these terms as convenient labels for what creationists will or will not accept in terms of eveolution, as opposed to their limited use in current literature, has led to this misperception of these terms as having originated with creationists. It is also possible that many individual creationists have their own idiosyncraticc definitions of these terms, but that is another issue.TTFN,WK

Isn't that what I just said? I wouldn't assume that all researchers working at that 'big picture' level necessarily use those terms however.My point was that it isn't as commonly used as other terms related to macroevolution, such as speciation. so we find only 92 hits for 'macroevolution' on Pubmed but 4778 for 'speciation'.The reasons for this seem to be partly historical, in that micro- and macro- evolution were terms favoured by the orthogeneticists like Schindewolf and Goldschmidt (and probably Salty) and consequently were not favoured by amany of the originators of the neo-darwinian synthesis, although they were initially introduced (at least in English) by Dobzhansky, who people never tire of quoting. Apparently there is some historical russo-germanic/ anglo-american divide in respect to the usage of the terms.TTFN,WKThis message has been edited by Wounded King, 07-13-2005 05:35 AM

But I was just agreeing with you!! Lets just agree to agree .TTFN,WK