Genetics

A friend draws our attention to this piece by Brian Miller at Evolution News & Views: Intelligent Design and the Advancement of Science DNA was expected to be the primary source of causality behind the operation and development of life. Such beliefs have previously raised concerns from leading scientists and mathematicians. For instance, physicist Walter Elsasser argued that the unfathomable complexity of the chemical and physically processes in life was “transcomputational” — beyond the realm of any theoretical means of computation. Moreover, the development of the embryo is not solely directed by DNA. Instead, it requires new “biotonic” principles. As a result, life cannot be reduced to chemistry and physics. An unbridgeable gap separates life from non-life. Similarly, mathematician René Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Finding a new species is a rare event in easy-to-see and well-studied organisms like butterflies, especially if they inhabit well-explored areas such as Europe. Researchers have now discovered the previously unknown South-Russian blue using an array of modern research techniques. Furthermore, the new species was found to possess 46 chromosomes, just like a human, whereas its closest relative has 68 chromosomes. … Discovered by Vladimir Lukhtanov, entomologist and evolutionary biologist at the Zoological Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Alexander Dantchenko, entomologist and chemist at the Moscow State University, the startling discovery was named South-Russian blue (Polyommatus australorossicus). It was found flying over the northern slopes of the Caucasus mountains in southern Russia. The study is published in Read More ›

Adam and Eve have never been so hot since the days everyone went to church. At least not to judge from the current Bottleneck War in genetics. It was sparked by British geneticist Richard Buggs pointing out in a journal that, strictly speaking, one fertile human pair could survive a bottleneck (Adam and Eve more or less, fig leaves optional). At first, he didn’t get mail. Then he got mail. Yesterday, we reported that Buggs (the Yes guy) was asking geneticist Dennis Venema (the big No guy) to provide sources for some claims. Over to Venema. Meanwhile, physicist Lee Spetner, author of The Evolution Revolution, writes to say that adaptability is built into organisms by transposable elements and thus assumptions Read More ›

From Phys.org: Female swallowtail butterflies do something a lot of butterflies do to survive: they mimic wing patterns, shapes and colors of other species that are toxic to predators. Some – but not all – swallowtail species have evolved several different forms of this trait. But what kind of genetic changes led to these various disguises, and why would some species maintain an undisguised form when mimicry provides an obvious evolutionary advantage? In a new study published this week in Nature Communications, scientists from the University of Chicago analyze genetic data from a group of swallowtail species to find out when and how mimicry first evolved, and what has been driving those changes since then. It’s a story that started around Read More ›

The last round was Adam, Eve, Richard Buggs, and Dennis Venema: Could Adam and Eve have existed?, where Dennis Venema (no) replied to Richard Buggs (yes). Now, Richard Buggs replies, Now to look in more detail at the points you raise about allelic diversity. This is where I think your argument is strongest, so I would like to examine it in some detail. To do this full justice, I want to start with what you say about this in your book chapter. One of your most explicit statements about this in your book chapter is as follows: …scientists have many other methods at their disposal to measure just how large our population has been over time. One simple way is Read More ›

This isn’t an area where facts seem to matter much anyhow, at least not at universities. From geneticist Jenny Graves at Intellectual Takeout: In their new paper, the authors Gershoni and Pietrokovsk looked at how active the same genes are in men and women. They measured the RNA produced by 18,670 genes in 53 different tissues (45 common to both sexes) in 544 adult post mortem donors (357 men and 187 women). They found that about one third of these genes (more than 6,500) had very different activities in men and women. Some genes were active in men only or women only. Many genes were far more active in one sex or the other. A few of these genes showed Read More ›

Dennis Venema replies to Buggs, insisting that Adam and Eve could not likely exist. Geneticist Richard Buggs thinks that they could have. Dennis VenemaFrom Venema at BioLogos: The key here is that one individual can only have at most two alleles of any gene. A population reduction to one breeding pair would mean that at most, four alleles of a given gene could pass through the bottleneck – in the case where both individuals are heterozygous, and heterozygous for different alleles. The population would then have to wait for new mutation events to produce new alleles of this gene – a process that will take a significant amount of time. Since this would happen to all genes in the genome at Read More ›

Suzan Mazur reports in HuffPost: on Evelyn Fox Keller’s talk on genetics, factual and fictional, at the recent D’Arcy Thompson festival. From her transcript: Today we are in a new century, one in which the landscape of biological thought is once again being radically reconfigured. With the maturation of molecular biology, the genome has been transformed from the executive director of biological development or as Schrödinger put it—-an architect’s plan and builder’s plan—-to the immensely complex physical-chemical structures that seem to need no new laws of physics only a Herculean effort of sifting through the jungle of physical and chemical interactions responsible for what it can and cannot do. This explanation is itself largely the result of a turn from Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists theorized that they could manipulate a protein one mutation at a time and predict its evolution. They sought to prove it. And failed. They do think, however, that they’ve found a fundamental truth underlying unpredictability in a biological system. Basic physical limitations make uncertainty the norm, they reported in a paper published online Oct. 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “While we got a surprising negative result, we were able to say why,” said Michael J. Harms, a professor in the UO Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and scientist in the Institute of Molecular Biology. “That is a positive. Our simple study provides confirmation of what many people in the field have observed Read More ›

Here’s the abstract of a new PNAS article: There’s a new article in PNAS that illustrates the fact that thermodynamics determines the effects of future changes made to a protein molecule. Any one mutation changes the thermodynamic/statistical mechanics of the protein molecule. And these changes in the thermodynamic properties swims around in a giant ocean of statistical possibilities, and consequent improbabilities; so much so, that future mutations following upon any given mutation cannot be ascertained. So, the next time you hear about how they were able to “reconstruct” an ancient protein, allowing the determination of possible pathways, don’t pay any attention to it. Evolutionary prediction is of deep practical and philosophical importance. Here we show, using a simple computational protein Read More ›

Recently, British geneticist Richard Buggs defended the view that a modern human pair could have escaped a genetic bottleneck: It is easy to have misleading intuitions about the population genetic effects of a short, sudden bottleneck. For example, Ernst Mayr suggested that many species had passed through extreme bottlenecks in founder events. He argued that extreme loss of diversity in such events would promote evolutionary change. The matter was taken up at The Skeptical Zone where population geneticist Joe Felsenstein, among others, replied, skeptical but not ruling the idea out. Now Buggs has replied at the Zone to comments by Felsenstein and Schaffner: First, I note that both Schaffner and Felsenstein agree with my point that the bottleneck hypothesis has Read More ›

We didn’t predict this one and it’s not the story you think. Recently, geneticist Richard Buggs defended the possibility in principle that a human population bottleneck could consist of one fertile couple. At the Zone (founded by former UD commenters among others), Vincent Torley writes: Geneticist Richard Buggs, Reader in Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London, has just written an intriguing article in Nature: Ecology and Evolution (28 October 2017), titled, Adam and Eve: a tested hypothesis? Comments on a recent book chapter. It appears that Buggs is unpersuaded that science has ruled out Adam and Eve. He thinks it’s still theoretically possible that the human race once passed through a short, sharp population bottleneck of just two Read More ›

Against theistic evolutionists who insist that a single human pair is not biologically possible. Recently, British plant geneticist Richard Buggs posted a letter he had sent in May to BioLogos’ Dennis Venema, taking issue with the claim that a population of 10,000 is required, as stated in Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight, Adam and the Genome. Buggs never got an answer and he has since posted further thoughts at Nature: Ecology and Evolution (community): Does genomic evidence make it scientifically impossible that the human lineage could have ever passed through a population bottleneck of just two individuals? This is a question I am asked semi-frequently by religious friends. With my current understanding of the genetic evidence, I can’t state categorically Read More ›

From Dan Samorodnitsky at MassiveSci: This goes for your genome, too. It’s easy to imagine that your genes are clean, orderly, and easily known. Companies like 23andme and Ancestry.com make their bones off this idea, that our building blocks are transparent and readable like a book. But that’s not really what a genome is. Genomes are slap-dash, hodgepodge collections of genes, often in no discernible order. And a lot of it isn’t even the owner’s genes. In the 1950, Barbara McClintock identified “jumping genes,” which could move essentially of their own accord and change the appearance of maize stalks. (That’s a skull-shattering discovery to make, working alone and before the structure of DNA was determined, but because the Nobel Prizes Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers from the Institute of Population Genetics at Vetmeduni Vienna, using a new and highly specific analysis method, could now provide fresh momentum to help decode the evolutionary dynamics of the Y chromosome. Their study shows that ten times more new genes are transferred onto the Y chromosome in fruit flies than had been previously thought. Some of these new genes even appear to have taken on important functions. … A special surprise for the research team was that four of the 25 newly transferred genes on the Y chromosome have already assumed an important function there. “As these new genes can be found in all individuals of a species, the question arises as to which functions these Read More ›