Posted on 03/08/2006 3:25:00 PM PST by Pharmboy
Do you feel them like stabs in the heart?
"Get your stinking paws off my gun, you damned dirty ape!"
Gene secrets of mice and men revealedWith 99 per cent of our DNA now confirmed to match that of Mus musculus, geneticists can find out how human genes work with experiments on their favourite lab animal... Mice have around 300 genes humans do not and vice versa. The biggest disparities are linked to sex, smell, immunity and detoxification... It reveals that mice have 14 per cent less DNA than we do, totalling about 2.5 billion nucleotide base pairs against our own 2.9 billion. And for about 80 per cent of genes, there is an exact, single match in humans. The remainder are "spares", and the 300 or so genes unique to mice.
by Andy Coghlan and Philip Cohen
You just said, is it A causes B, or A causes B?
Almost. Rapid Evolution might not occur until the environment changes because there is no advantage to being different than the rest of the species. For example it's well known that a population isolated to a small region will become smaller. Thus the so called "hobbits" of that island in the Southwest Pacific, which also had small versions of other species as well as little people. However if the species is not isolated that way, it stays "normal" size. Until the ice comes there is no advantage to being able to retain heat better than your fellows, and so on. The potential for change is there, but those individuals carrying the changed genes and characterics have no reproductive advantage, and might have a disadvantage.
That's the conventional wisdom, but this research seems to indicate that the change in environment actually speeds up the changes, both good (adaptive) and bad (non-adaptive).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.