Category: horizontal gene transfer
Earliest pre-life depended on horizontal gene transfer?
| September 11, 2017 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta: Nigel Goldenfeld applies the physics of condensed matter to understand why evolution was blazingly fast for the earliest life — and then slowed down. Cepelewicz So how can collective effects in physics inform our understanding of evolution? Goldenfeld: When you think about evolution, you typically tend to think about population […]
Genomic analysis sheds more light on amazing, indestructible tardigrade (water bear)
| July 29, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genomics, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design |
But leaves phylogeny unclear. From ScienceDaily: Tardigrades are microscopic animals, justly famous for their amazing ability to withstand complete dehydration, resurrecting years later when water is again available. Once desiccated, they have been frozen in ice, exposed to radiation, sent into space vacuum… and still they spring back to life. Tardigrades became more famous recently […]
Pushback against “deep evolution” (we are descended from complex ancestor) and HGT
| March 20, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Also, doubts about horizontal gene transfer persist. First, from Suzan Mazur earlier at Huffington Post on deep evolution: I recently had a three-way phone conversation with Swedish deep evolution investigators Charles Kurland and Ajith Harish about their phylogenomic Tree of Life (ToL) based on protein structure, which shows that we are descended from a “complex” ancestor […]
Horizontal gene transfer in bacteria: Numbers surprise researchers
| March 8, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, News |
From ScienceDaily: Gene transfers are particularly common in the antibiotic-resistance genes of Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria. When mammals breed, the genome of the offspring is a combination of the parents’ genomes. Bacteria, by contrast, reproduce through cell division. In theory, this means that the genomes of the offspring are copies of the parent genome. However, the […]
Origin of life: Horizontal gene transfer “negligible” and endosymbiosis “wrong” as factors in earliest known life?
| February 28, 2017 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Evolution, Genetics, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From science writer Suzan Mazur, author of Paradigm Shifters, continuing her interview at Huffington Post with Swedish deep evolution investigators Charles Kurland and Ajith Harish regarding … their central position on deep evolution, which is that the most recent universal common ancestor (MRUCA) is complex not a simple bacteria and “is the root of eukaryote and […]
Nature launches new journal: Nature Ecology & Evolution
| November 11, 2016 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Peer review, Science |
Here: Multicopy plasmids potentiate the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria As well as allowing horizontal gene transfer, the increased copy number of plasmids could accelerate evolution. Here, it is shown that… More. One can browse four articles for free, include the above. Perhaps they are hoping to accommodate non-Darwinian evolution more formally. Follow UD […]
Horizontal gene transfer: Virus carries DNA of black widow spider toxin
| October 31, 2016 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, News |
Everyone goes a bit nuts at Hallowe’en and I (O’Leary for News) just couldn’t resist this one, before I go back to serious work. From ScienceDaily: Biologists sequencing the genome of the WO virus, which infects the bacterial parasite Wolbachia, have discovered that the phage carries DNA that produces black widow spider toxin: the first […]
Can parasitic plants use hosts’ genes against them?
| October 29, 2016 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, News |
From ScienceDaily: Sneaky parasitic weeds may be able to steal genes from the plants they are attacking and then use those genes against the host plant, according to a team of scientists. In a study, researchers detected 52 incidents of the nonsexual transfer of DNA — known as horizontal gene transfer, or HGT — from […]
Horizontal gene transfer: Researchers believe any two major groups of organisms can share genetic codes
| October 26, 2016 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, News |
This is not the “evolution” your high school textbook set forth. That stuff was Darwinism, plain and simple. From Kelly Robinson and Julie Dunning Hotopp at The Scientist Scientists now recognize that microbes transfer DNA to the plants, fungi, and animals they infect or reside in, and conversely, human long interspersed elements (LINEs) have been […]
Darwinism is a metaphysic. What is it doing in schoolbook science?
| June 7, 2016 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, science education |
Today? Looking back on the Darwin-in-the-schools wars from the vantage point of rethinking evolution, one calls to mind textbook author Douglas Futuyma’s dictum: Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design […]
Denis Noble: Evolution needs replacement, not extension
| June 6, 2016 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Epigenetics, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer |
In The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing “the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin,” Oxford’s Denis Noble explains to Suzan Mazur why our understanding of evolution needs to be replaced, not merely extended: The reasons I think we’re talking about replacement rather than extension are several. The first is that the exclusion of any form of acquired characteristics […]
HGT: Gut microbes jump to insect hosts
| June 2, 2016 | Posted by News under Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, News |
From ScienceDaily: Many plant-feeding insects need microbial enzymes, such as pectinases, that degrade plant cell walls; yet some insects have overcome this dependency in a surprising way. Now researchers found that stick insects make microbial enzymes themselves. From an ancestral gut microbe, the genes for the essential enzymes simply ‘jumped’ as they are to their […]
Horizontal gene transfer: Mapping antibiotic resistance
| April 28, 2016 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, News |
From ScienceDaily: Bacteria possess the ability to take up DNA from their environment, a skill that enables them to acquire new genes for antibiotic resistance or to escape the immune response. Scientists have now mapped the core set of genes that are consistently controlled during DNA uptake in strep bacteria, and they hope the finding […]
Water bear’s hybrid genome now disputed
| December 8, 2015 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, News |
From Washington Post: Tardigrades — otherwise known as water bears or (gasp) moss piglets — are weird. They can survive in the vacuum of space, for starters. So when researchers at the University of North Carolina announced on Nov. 23 that the minuscule animal had hitherto unheard of ratios of DNA borrowed from plants, fungi […]
This just in: One sixth of water bear’s genes are from microbes
| November 24, 2015 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, News |
From The Atlantic: The toughest animals in the world aren’t bulky elephants, or cold-tolerant penguins, or even the famously durable cockroach. Instead, the champions of durability are endearing microscopic creatures called tardigrades, or water bears. They live everywhere, from the tallest mountains to the deepest oceans, and from hot springs to Antarctic ice. They can […]
How horizontal gene transfer has shaped the web of life
| November 24, 2015 | Posted by News under Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, News |
“using examples of HGT among prokaryotes, between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and even between multicellular eukaryotes” From Nature Reviews Genetics:, should feature many useful examples: Here’s the abstract: Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is the sharing of genetic material between organisms that are not in a parent–offspring relationship. HGT is a widely recognized mechanism for adaptation in […]
Crunchy granola alert: Butterflies may be GMOs
| September 24, 2015 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, News |
Ah yes ,the time of year in many parts of North America when, everywhere you look, there is a Monarch (an orange butterfly) flap gliding around. They migrate in vast masses from mid-north Canada to Mexico. Now, from New Scientist: Wasps first turned bracoviruses into biological weapons around 100 million years ago. There are now […]
HGT: Growth of antibiotic resistance termed “bacterial sex”
| August 28, 2015 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, News |
From ScienceDaily: Biologist investigates how gene-swapping bacteria evade antibiotics “One of the prevailing theories for why bacteria make these antibiotic compounds is to fight off competition. But the bacteria that make the antibiotics have to be resistant to those antibiotics. Therefore, many encode antibiotic resistance genes against their own products.” Random genetic mutation is one […]
Anything HGT does, Darwinian evolution did not do
| August 13, 2015 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer |
From Horizontal gene transfer: Sorry, Darwin, it’s not your evolution any more: Richard Dawkins: For over a century, Darwinism was the “must be” explanation, the only “scientific one.” As Dawkins put it (p. 287, Blind Watchmaker, 1986): My argument will be that Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of […]
Talk to the Fossils: Let’s see what they say back
| July 1, 2015 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Culture, Darwinism, Epigenetics, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design |
O’Leary for News’s new series here at Evolution News & Views: A while back, I started a series here called “Science Fictions” that I began by asking a simple question: Why is the space alien understood as science but Bigfoot as mythology? The reason I asked is that, still lacking specimens of either entity, decade […]
