From Brandon Keim (Wired, July 29, 2011), we learn, “Your Genome Structure, Not Genetic Mutations, Makes You Different”:
A new look at the human genome suggests that unappreciated variations in its fundamental architecture, rather than point-by-point mutations, may be responsible for most genetic difference among people.
Anyone remember the Central Dogma of Genetics? One gene, one protein? “almost no exceptions”? Darwinism, gene by gene? What if it is more like this:
In the new study, Wang and colleagues used algorithms that assemble long, relatively intact genome sequences from small fragments, allowing them to see more structural variation than is usually possible. In a high-profile earlier study, they’d used it to sequence a giant panda genome; this time they compared structural variations across 106 people from the 1000 Genomes Project.
They found that individuals seem to be distinguished less by their SNPs than their structural variations. “Defining structural variations will be of considerable importance for future analyses of personal genomes,” they wrote.
The question isn’t whether Darwinism can “explain” this, but whether Darwinism is even relevant any more. It may have been relevant in the days of the Central Dogma, but … in the story about bacterial “spite” or long range planning among horses, Darwinism is only explaining itself, in increasingly bizarre ways.
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