Free Republic

Humans contain 'alien' genes not passed on from our ancestors, researchers have discovered. The say we acquired essential 'foreign' genes from microorganisms co-habiting their environment in ancient times. The study challenges conventional views that animal evolution relies solely on genes passed down through ancestral lines -- and says the process could still be going on. Cambridge researchers say we acquired essential 'foreign' genes from microorganisms co-habiting their environment in ancient times. Horizontal Gene Transfer The transfer of genes between organisms living in the same environment is known as horizontal gene transfer (HGT). It is well known in single-celled organisms and...

Not to mince words - the modern synthesis is gone --snip-- "The discovery of pervasive HGT and the overall dynamics of the genetic universe destroys not only the tree of life as we knew it but also another central tenet of the modern synthesis inherited from Darwin, namely gradualism. In a world dominated by HGT, gene duplication, gene loss and such momentous events as endosymbiosis, the idea of evolution being driven primarily by infinitesimal heritable changes in the Darwinian tradition has become untenable." ...

Is Horizontal Gene Transfer a Force for Evolution? April 13, 2009 — Two more genomes were published last week: the information libraries of two tiny microbes.  They are members of Micromonas, green algae less than two microns across.  The original paper and summary both bragged about how the genetic information is helping shed light on evolution, but did the data really contain any light?  If so, the light was pointing downward. Worden et al published the genomes of RCC299 and CCMP1545, two isolates of the picophytoplankton clade Micromonas.1 John M. Archibald commented on the paper in Perspectives article in the same...

Darwinists Topple Darwin’s Tree of Life Darwin’s “Tree of Life” is a myth. It’s based on circular reasoning. It is a pattern imposed on the data, not a fact emerging from the evidence. We should give up the search for a single tree of life (TOL) as a record of the history of life on earth, because it is a “quixotic pursuit” unlikely to succeed – and the evidence is against it. Who said this? Not creationists, but a new member of the National Academy of Sciences in his inaugural paper for the academy’s Proceedings.1 W. Ford Doolittle and Eric...

Essay Nature 445, 369 (25 January 2007) | doi:10.1038/445369a; Published online 24 January 2007ConnectionsBiology's next revolution Nigel Goldenfeld1 and Carl Woese2 Nigel Goldenfeld is in the Department of Physics and Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.Carl Woese is in the Department of Microbiology and Institute for Genomic Biology, 601 South Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA. Top of pageAbstract The emerging picture of microbes as gene-swapping collectives demands a revision of such concepts as organism, species and evolution itself. One of the most fundamental patterns of scientific discovery...