Boing Boing: Horizontal gene transfer explains evolutionary jumps

Paul says:

Rice University study models “Horizontal Gene Transfer,” a mechanism for evolution where big chunks of DNA migrate between different species via bacteria. This results in faster and more sudden evolutionary branching than what you get with the more familiar mechanisms of sexual selection or random single-point mutations caused by radiation, copying errors, etc.

Now I feel better about eating those tomatoes with the fish genes in them! (Flavr Savr)

My take:
I’m not sure who Paul is, but he gets Horizontal Gene Transfer totally wrong. Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) (sometimes “Lateral Gene Transfer”) is predominantly an event that occurs between two prokaryotic (read: bacteria) cells. Although there is evidence for some unicellular eukaryotic HGT, multicellular HGT has yet to be observed. Bottom line, Horizontal Gene Transfer does “speed up” evolution (and at the same time, totally complicates the analysis of bacterial genomes), and it does explain some evolutionary “jumps,” but it doesn’t explain all of them, and certainly not ones in multicellular eukaryotes.

Also, FlavrSavr tomatoes did not have fish genes in them. In fact, no tomato that has ever reached the market has had fish genes in them. The Flavr Savr tomato contained an antisense gene for polygalacturonase. That is, it shut down the gene expression of polygalacturonase. Polygalacturonase is a pectinase which breaks down pectin. When pectin is broken down, the cell walls get mushier and the fruit gets softer. That is, it’s part of the ripening process.

Furthermore, Flavr Savr tomatoes are no longer for sale in the United States and their trademark has expired.

Tags:
Horizontal gene transfer transgenic GMO flavr savr boingboing pectin GMOs evolution phylogeny

I am posting the following spontaneous IM yawp at the request of Rog:

[10:37] Heatkernel:* yeah, man the proterozoic era
[10:37] Heatkernel: that was the real party time
[10:37] Heatkernel: for the microbes
[10:37] Heatkernel: I’ve been reading about that in Margulis

(* “Heatkernel” substituted for actual IM screen name).

These researchers have demonstrated that people can distinguish pretty faces from not so pretty faces in 13 milliseconds. i.e. they can not remember what the face looks like as this amount of time is pretty much sublimintal, but they are pretty sure it is attractive or not.
First Impressions Of Beauty May Demonstrate Why The Pretty Prosper

It’s amazing to ponder how much of our thinking is done without even thinking about it…

In this article:SI.com – Writers – John Walters: Were DeBerry’s comments really inaccurate? John Walters does some simplistic analysis trying to show that yes, there are more African-American players in the so-called speed positions of American Football. This is obvious to anyone with a television. Without getting into DeBerry’s comments specifically, I’d like to point out that it seems people have a hard time saying/realizing/accepting that African Americans are “faster” than other racial makeups. And by African American, I mean West Africans or the descendants of West Africans as this is where slaves were taken from. East Africans such as Ethiopians, Eritreans etc. dominate marathons just as West Africans dominate sprints, and Caucasians are usually the best at upper body strength. Just as males are faster and stronger than women.

It’s a fact that every human being who has run 100m in under 10 seconds was a male of West African descent. And the 100m dash, along with pretty much all track events, are the most democratized sports in the world. No fancy equipment, not much strategy (there are some tactics though), and everybody in the world can play and practice at home. Therefore, it seems to me that it has more to do with “nature” than “nurture.”

I realize, of course, that some people have the mistaken idea that if you’re good at something, then you have to be bad at something else and e.g., nobody could be a good athlete and smart too. Or, they want to think that intelligence, which being super-multidimensional is way harder to measure than one or two-dimensional “speed”, has a huge genetic component. Hopefully, one day people will wake up.

Over on PolySciFi Blog, Jody has a post about how John Paul II has jumped the shark. Well, I looked him up on Jump the Shark and this is how the voting is going so far:

And before anybody flips out on me, I wish him the best and hope he makes a full recovery.

CNN.com – ‘Intelligent design’ taught in Pennsylvania – Jan 19, 2005: “‘The revolution in evolution has begun,’ said Richard Thompson, the law center’s president and chief counsel. ‘This is the first step in which students will be given an honest scientific evaluation of the theory of evolution and its problems.’”

Intelligent design doesn’t sound very scientific to me.

Biology teacher Jennifer Miller said although she was able to make a smooth transition to her evolution lesson after the statement was read, some students were upset that administrators would not entertain any questions about intelligent design.

“They were told that if you have any questions, to take it home,” Miller said.

Hmmm, that doesn’t sound very scientific either.

Primal Man? – by Jack T. Chick

You make the call! What a cruel hoax! And to think of all that silt disappearing every year!