Category: horizontal gene transfer
Jerry Coyne minimizes the significance of horizontal gene transfer
| August 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design |
As we might expect. Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne offers his thoughts on science writer David Quammen’s new book about Carl Woese, The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life: Quammen is right that the horizontal transfer of genetic information does complicate our effort to understand the evolutionary past, but he goes too far in claiming […]
At New York Times: Darwin skeptic Carl Woese “effectively founded a new branch of science”
| August 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Epigenetics, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Tree of life |
David Quammen, author of The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life, a biography of Darwin skeptic Carl Woese, who discovered the Archaea, offers a long reflection at the New York Times on how biology is moving away from Darwinism: Woese was a rebel researcher, obscure but ingenious, crotchety, driven. He had his Warholian 15 […]
Does horizontal gene transfer enable genetic parasites to survive natural selection?
| August 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
Researchers Iranzo and Koonin ask: Typically, natural selection results in deletions of harmful genes, so the main question is, why hasn’t natural selection wiped out genetic parasites? They mean “transposons, plasmids, viruses” etc., that offer no benefit to the hosts. They offer a hypothesis: In a new study published in EPL, researchers Jaime Iranzo and […]
At Nature: New evolution book represents “radical” new perspective
| August 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Including things you didn’t know about Archaea discoverer, Carl Woese. From a review of The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen (Simon & Schuster, 2018): In The Tangled Tree, celebrated science writer David Quammen tells perhaps the grandest tale in biology: how scientists used gene sequencing to elucidate the evolutionary relationships […]
Horizontal gene transfer from tunicates helps beetles against fungus
| July 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design |
The genes were transferred to the beetles, researchers say, from sea squirts (tunicates) , with whom they have, may we say, not much in common, by microorganisms (symbiont bacterial strains). From ScienceDaily: An international team of researchers led by scientists of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and […]
Bats “steal” genes from ebola-related virus
| July 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, horizontal gene transfer |
Which now seem to serve an as-yet-unknown function in the bat. From ScienceDaily: Some 18 million years ago, an ancestor of mouse-eared bats “stole” genetic material from an ancient virus related to Bola. The swiped genetic sequence — a gene called VP35 — has remained largely intact in the bats despite the passage of time, with few […]
Researchers: Cross species transfer has been “an important driver of evolution”
| July 10, 2018 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Far from just being the product of our parents, University of Adelaide scientists have shown that widespread transfer of genes between species has radically changed the genomes of today’s mammals, and been an important driver of evolution. In the world’s largest study of so-called “jumping genes,” the researchers have traced two particular jumping […]
Researchers: Horizontal gene transfer drives global infectious disease
| April 20, 2018 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: A new study by scientists at the University of Liverpool documents, for the first time, how the ability of bacteria to swap genetic material with each other can directly affect the emergence and spread of globally important infectious diseases. Known as ‘horizontal gene transfer’, this phenomenon is understood to have played a role […]
Sure we need to teach evolution: How about horizontal gene transfer in antibiotic resistance?
| March 5, 2018 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design |
Not how we are all apes but how bacteria can get the better of us? Jathink? From ScienceDaily: That may sound scarce; however, .” ..as only a small number of strains (<10%) were isolated from farm and urban environments, we were surprised to find one with mcr-1 on a transferable plasmid, which is a relatively […]
Giant virus shares genes (core histones) with complex life forms. But what exactly does that imply?
| February 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Tree of life |
From ScienceDaily: “It’s exciting and significant to find a living family of giant viruses with eukaryote-specific genes in a form that predates the latest common ancestor of all eukaryotes,” says Albert Erives, associate professor in the Department of Biology. “These viruses are like time machines that tell us more about how life on our planet […]
Researchers: Could an ancient virus account for human consciousness?
| February 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Mind, Neuroscience |
From Rafi Letzter at LiveScience: According to two papers published in the journal Cell in January, long ago, a virus bound its genetic code to the genome of four-limbed animals. That snippet of code is still very much alive in humans’ brains today, where it does the very viral task of packaging up genetic information […]
(Real non-Darwinian) evolution in action: Bacteria murder rivals and steal their genes
| December 30, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
From ScienceDaily: Bacteria not only develop resistance to antibiotics, they also can pick it up from their rivals. In a recent publication in Cell Reports, Researchers from the Biozentrum of the University of Basel have demonstrated that some bacteria inject a toxic cocktail into their competitors causing cell lysis and death. Then, by integrating the […]
Researchers ask: Do viruses share genes across the kingdoms of life?
| December 9, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer |
Horizontal gene transfer on skates. Wow, re evolution. From ScienceDaily: A new study finds that viruses share some genes exclusively with cells that are not their hosts. The study, reported in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, adds to the evidence that viruses swap genes with a variety of cellular organisms and are agents of diversity, […]
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 […]
