
From ScienceDaily:
University of Otago researchers have discovered information about a gene that sets primates — great apes and humans — apart from other mammals, through the study of a rare developmental brain disorder.
…
Dr O’Neill and research collaborators from Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Germany, then set forth to test the point that the gene drives aspects of brain development that are unique to primates. Some amazing data was found using a novel approach through studying human “mini-brains” in culture. It is now possible to take a skin cell and transform it using a set of genetic tricks, so that it can be triggered to form a tiny brain-like structure in culture in the lab.
Their results showed that the particular genetic change that disabled a component of this gene (PLEKHG6) altered its ability to support the growth and proliferation of specialised stem cells in the developing brain. In addition, some of these cells also failed to migrate to their correct position in the growing “mini-brain” during the first few weeks of brain development.
Professor Robertson says it has been known for a while that these stem cells behave differently between primates/humans and other animals, but understanding what genes regulate these differences has been a mystery.
“Adam’s achievement has been to show that this particular component of the PLEKHG6 gene is one such regulator that humans have ‘acquired’ very recently in their evolution to make their brains ‘exceptional’.”
Dr O’Neill says there are very few genetic elements that are primate specific in our genome, so this discovery adds to a very short list of genetic factors that, at least in one sense, make us human. – Material provided by the University of Otago More.
Here’s the paper. (open access) Summary:
The mammalian neocortex has undergone remarkable changes through evolution. A consequence of
such rapid evolutionary events could be a trade-off that has rendered the brain susceptible to certain neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric conditions. We analyzed the exomes of 65 patients with the structural brain malformation periventricular nodular heterotopia (PH). De novo coding variants were observed in excess in genes defining a transcriptomic signature of basal radial glia, a cell type linked to brain evolution. In addition, we located two variants in human isoforms of two genes that have no ortholog in mice. Modulating the levels of one of these isoforms for the gene PLEKHG6 demonstrated its role in regulating neuroprogenitor differentiation and neuronal migration via RhoA, with phenotypic recapitulation of PH in human cerebral organoids. This suggests that this PLEKHG6 isoform is an example of a primate-specific genomic element supporting brain development.
Follow UD News at Twitter!
See also: Researchers: Primates vary in speech capability. (But none speak.)
and
Study: Humans are the only primates that show kindness?
Looking forward to my upcoming brain transplant!
This seems like bad news for the ID fans.
More evidence supporting Darwinian evolution.
I don’t expect any reaction from the ID side, though.
Just silence.
No, PavelU. This in no way supports Darwinian evolution. Darwinian evolution can’t even account for the existence of eukaryotes and it has to be given starting populations of prokaryotes.
Something tells me that this gene that supposedly sets “primates — great apes and humans — apart from other mammals” will probably be found in kangaroos and dolphins as well:
While Darwinists often appeal to genetic similarity to try to argue for common descent, Darwinists will completely ignore genetic similarity when it falsifies their theory of common descent.
For instance, identical forms of echolocation show up in widely divergent species. This finding is unexpected from an evolutionary perspective, yet this finding is exactly what we would expect to find from presupposing a Creator to reuse optimal designs:
In fact, “convergent evolution”, i.e. unexpectedly similar designs showing up in widely divergent species, is far more widespread of a problem for Darwinists than they will ever honestly admit:
In fact, Simon Conway Morris has a website documenting hundreds, if not thousands, of examples of unexpected and unexplained ‘convergent evolution’:
“Convergent Evolution”, in reality, is actually another shining example that Darwinian evolution is a unfalsifiable pseudoscience instead of a real, i.e. testable, science.
Here are a few more in depth notes on the unfalsifiable nature of the pseudoscience of Darwinian evolution:
Of related interest, the supposed 98.5% genetic similarity was recently, by two different studies, revised downwards to approx. 85%:
Where you find the greatest differences between humans, chimps, kangaroos, dolphins, etc.. etc.. is not in the DNA sequences but is in the ‘alternative splicing patterns’ between different species. Species specific regulatory patterns that tell the genes how to get used within a species:
Moreover, Alternatively spliced isoforms of proteins exhibit strikingly different interaction profiles and thus, in the context of global interactome networks, appear to behave as if encoded by distinct genes rather than as minor variants of each other.,,, and,,, As many as 100,000 distinct isoform transcripts could be produced from the 20,000 human protein-coding genes.
To say alternative splicing patterns that are unique to each species is a problem for Darwinian claims is an understatement. ‘Species specific’ alternative splicing patterns, since they are part of the developmental Gene Regulatory Network (dGRN), and since they are extremely intolerant to ‘adjustments’, straight-up falsify Darwinian claims.
Like everything else that goes against their theory, unique alternative splicing patterns within species falsifies Darwinian claims, but Darwinists simply ignore any and all falsifying evidence of their claims:
Moreover, it doesn’t matter how genetically similar two different species may be. Body plans simply are not reducible to mutations to DNA (as was presupposed in Darwinian thought).
As Dr. Stephen Meyer puts it, “you can mutate DNA indefinitely. 80 million years, 100 million years, til the cows come home. It doesn’t matter, because in the best case you are just going to find a new protein some place out there in that vast combinatorial sequence space. You are not, by mutating DNA alone, going to generate higher order structures that are necessary to building a body plan.”
Actually, via Godel’s incompleteness theorem being extended to physics, the problem of biological form, for any reductive materialistic explanation of Darwinian evolution is found to go much deeper than just mutations to DNA itself
In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
Here are a few more notes to drive this point home:
To state what should be glaringly obvious, since neo-Darwinian (reductive materialistic) explanations are grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form, then neo-Darwinian speculations for how one type of organism might transform into another type of organism are based on pure fantasy and have no discernible experimental basis in reality.
Whereas, on the other hand, Theism, especially with these recent breakthroughs in quantum biology,,,
,,,is found to be very well supported in its claim that God has formed each of us in our mother’s womb.
Verses:
bornagain77 at 4, you relate: Kangaroo genes close to humans – 2008
Excerpt: Australia’s kangaroos are genetically similar to humans,,, “There are a few differences, we have a few more of this, a few less of that, but they are the same genes and a lot of them are in the same order,” ,,,”We thought they’d be completely scrambled, but they’re not. There is great chunks of the human genome which is sitting right there in the kangaroo genome,”
http://www.reuters.com/article…..P020081118
Well, it that (the chunks) does not at least excite curiosity about whether what we have been told about origins is correct, I can’t think what would.
Is PavelU ever going to make the case that the evidence supports Darwinian evolution?