When did we crack the soil genome?
Posted on 11/22/2002 9:09:10 PM PST by forsnax5
When did we crack the soil genome?
He had 10 bad years but recovered. He died a little young anyway. Too much cheese in the diet.
If conditions were just right for the formation of one living organism, couldn't billions of unrelated living organisms have started up at the same time? It is a large planet, lots of room for lots of organisms.
Then some organisms might have had offspring and some might not, and there is the lawn, with many of the individual grass plants being similar but not identical.
Eventually one family line will dominate in an area. We see this clearly in the fall when leaves change in the forest. All the leaves of one kind of tree in one area of the forest will change at the same time, yet the leaves of the same kind of tree in a different part of the forest will change at a different time. You can see this, it is clusters of autumn color separated by clusters of green. Each cluster of autumn color is of related individuals.
So the descendents of one aboriginal organism will carry on, and descendents of another aboriginal organism will disappear. Of the billions or trillions or zentillions of aboriginal unrelated organisms, only a few billion family lines survive to this day.
Can DNA be traced back to a single aboriginal strand of DNA? Consider that some DNA sequences are favored and will appear in many different, unrelated family lines out of the zentillions of aboriginal unrelated family lines.
Mere chance? No, not chance. Some DNA sequences favor survival.
LOL! It's just that I see all creatures being made up of pretty much the same stuff, genetically speaking about 25%. When I visualize that on a chart, I happen to think it'll look like soil. Just my two cents...
Yes, the daffodil and the chimpanzee are 25% the same. Likewise, the daffodil and the human are 25% the same. If that article is right, the first 25% (or more) is a given.
As to the lawn model: Is it likely that there was first a living organism and that everything living descended from it?
My understanding is that fossils generally cannot provide tissue to map DNA information. If that is the case, and if this research project stays away from making projections based on evolution theory, what they'll end up with is a huge database with specific genetic information (which is also huge) on each and every known type of creature - plus a few that are now extinct.
Therefore, I do not see where this can project will have the database to graph a "tree" which has time vertically and morphology horizontally. It would be based on available genetic information.
But using that information, I can see them sorting, parsing and matching the database to look for genetic matches. If the resulting chart is genetic information vertically and morphology horizontally - I personally think it'll look like a "lawn."
Just my two cents...
Therefore, I do not see where this project will have the database to graph a "tree" which has time vertically and morphology horizontally - because the graph would be based on available genetic information as opposed to fossils.
Except when it comes to detecting design.... so say the Darwininians.
Which you have yet to define precisely.
It's simpler than that. When evolution is outlawed, all biology books are burned, and all biologists are ordered by the red guards (or perhaps blue guards?) into the fields to do brute agricultural labor, then everything will automatically be seen to have been Designed, as no other possibility will be permitted. Biology will then consist of a long list of 1.75 million unrelated, specially-created species. When that glorious day arrives, there will be no more crime, no more war, no more racism, no more poverty, no more disease, and no more sin in the world. Just as it was before Darwin.
A cheese and crevo thread!
Now should I have dutch apple pie with this or cherry ice cream...
A curious link you found there, Alamo-Girl, and you seemed to have missed the significant details in it.
It may be helpful to know just a little bit about how sequence comparisons are done. One can come up with a uniform lawn if each individual base in one genome is compared to any base in another genome. It will be completely non-informative and all organisms will stand alone as single blades. But people who like to think instead of lawyer aren't this stupid and will, instead, look for ways to find meaningful information from a sequence comparison. The first task is to align matching genes. Do you see immediately that the 25% random match is eliminated? That's how sequence comparisons are done in real life. (Even the lawn in your analogy would be a spotty one. It would be similar to the effect of representing each branch on the tree of life by a light and then projecting this light onto the ceiling. You've eliminated the time dimension.)
The next task is to set an estimate of expected matches just by chance. That's the base line. The actual match will be compared to the baseline. But it gets tough because mismatches between gene segments are usually not just single base mutations. They include inversions and deletions. Scores of biostatisticians and biomathematicians have created algorithms to turn that meaningless lawn into something significant. Important information does emerge. Core genes, like histone genes, are similar between daffodils and humans. Other genes don't find any match at all. You may not be aware that the chimp genome has not been sequenced. Comparisons are estimates based on the information we do have. (Don't worry, those estimates are not based on godless bayesean priors.) What emerges is a visual representation of the relationship between species. It's, roughly, a tree. The rooting isn't at a single point. The trunk is fuzzy. But as you move up the branches, distinct clarity emerges. Naturally, it would, because we have DNA sequences from extant species.
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