Posted on 11/27/2008 4:22:29 PM PST by Coyoteman
ONCE, we could only marvel at the wonder of life. Like movie audiences not so long ago, we had little idea of what went on behind the scenes.
How times have changed. As the genomes of more and more species are sequenced, geneticists are piecing together an extraordinarily detailed "Making of..." documentary. Nowadays, we can not only trace how the bodies of animals have evolved, we can even identify the genetic mutations behind these changes.
Most intriguing of all, we can now see how genes - which are the recipes for making proteins, the building blocks of life - arise in the first place. And the story is not unfolding quite as expected. ...
Some theoretical biologists think gene copies can also be preserved by other, more subtle, mechanisms, but the real challenge to the classical model comes from actual studies of new genes in various organisms. Earlier this year, in the most comprehensive study of its kind yet, a team led by Wen Wang of Kunming Institute of Zoology in Yunnan, China, looked at several closely related species of fruit fly. By comparing their genomes, Wang was able to identify new genes that have evolved in the 13 million years or so since these species split from a common ancestor.
One of Wang's surprise discoveries was that around 10 per cent of the new genes had arisen through a process called retroposition. This occurs when messenger RNA copies of genes - the blueprints sent to a cell's protein-making factories (see diagram) - are turned back into DNA that is then inserted somewhere else in the genome. Many viruses and genetic parasites copy themselves through retroposition, and the enzymes they produce sometimes accidentally retropose the RNA of their host cells.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
On the other hand now that we know that DNA Repair Mechanisms exist, all of the work reported on here will need to be REDONE!
The guys with the business raising fruit flies in Bloomington, Indiana will be positively delirious, as will the guys who raise the pygmy guinea pigs, the mutant llamas, the rotund horses, etc.
You would not believe the number of lab animals of all types being bread in that little area ~ it dominates the world!
The missing predictability means that macro / micro evolution is still not understood as a science. Evolution is still largely guesswork, actually fact-based science fiction, wrongly regarded as a solid science.
Actually, the theory of evolution does not change because of this research.
It is the details that are being filled in.
And we can expect a lot more such details to be filled in, or corrected, in the coming months and years. I think its exciting!
You are right, Coyoteman. This does not invalidate the mountains of data that support the theory of evolution; it just adds to that mountain... and brings further into focus the full shape of that theory.
But they're different fruit flies.
Different from what? In what way? Of all the varieties of the flies none has mutated or evolved into something else.
"Fruit flies" is a generic, layman's term.
From the Wiki article on fruit flies: "The entire genus, however, contains about 1,500 species and is very diverse in appearance, behavior, and breeding habitat."
Speciation has been observed whereby one species of fruit fly has changed into another species. Google: fruit fly speciation
The problem is that the integrity of macroevolution ideas hinges on the unknown details. That's why I've been waiting for evolutionists to cough up the DNA mutation timeline for the last decade, a timeline that shows how single-cell organism DNA can be mutated in stages into human DNA.
In the meanwhile, as I've said before, until macroevolution ideas can be verified with the consistent results of repeatable, scientific-method based experiments, such ideas remain fact-based science fiction.
In the short run, additional knowledge complicates things, but as time goes by, the conceptual framework becomes simpler and more elegant.
And the 'God of the gaps' has just become a little bit skinnier ...
The God of gaps is now in the crawl space between imaginary time and the beginning of the hot big bang. (See Hawkings.) Though, of course, if truly God, that’s all He needs.
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