At The Atlantic, Katherine J. Wu lets us in on a surprising genetic fact about mice and cats:
At some point in its evolutionary past, the mouse shuffled its ancestral genome like a deck of cards, futzing up the architecture that makes most other mammalian genomes look, well, mammalian. “I always consider it the greatest outlier,” Bill Murphy, a geneticist at Texas A&M University, told me. “It’s about as different from any other placental mammal genome as you can find, sort of like it’s the moon, compared to everything else being on the Earth.”
Katherine J. Wu, “One More Thing We Have in Common With Cats” at The Atlantic (July 28, 2021)
Mice are useful for research (easily bred and fungible) butt hey don;t tell us much about oour own genome. And cats?
Cats, it turns out, harbor genomes that look and behave remarkably like ours. “Other than primates, the cat-human comparison is one of the closest you can get,” with respect to genome organization, Leslie Lyons, an expert in cat genetics at the University of Missouri, told me.
Katherine J. Wu, “One More Thing We Have in Common With Cats” at The Atlantic (July 28, 2021)
Also, as so many cats live with people, they share many lifestyle disease issues with us.
But who would have thought that cats and humans would have such close genomes?
Some researchers now study them to learn more about human diseases. Fine, just so long as they don’t treat them the way they treat mice — or the way cats treat mice.
See also: In what ways are cats intelligent? Cats have nearly twice as many neurons as dogs and a bigger and more complex cerebral cortex.
I don’t think any cat person is going to be much surprised by this.
https://ansc.illinois.edu/news/human-pig-genome-comparison-complete-0
“We took the human genome, cut it into 173 puzzle pieces and rearranged it to make a pig,” said Schook. “Everything matches up perfectly. The pig is genetically very close to humans.”
Of course cats smell better than pigs…and look better. But they don’t taste as good.
As to
Well, actually Kangaroos and Dolphins, (and pigs, etc..), would give the cat a run for its money,
Moreover, chimpanzee genomes are not nearly as similar to human genomes as was once believed, (98.5% then, approx. 85 percent now, and, realistically, even lower than that).
Where the differences between species are found to be greatest is in gene regulatory networks. In fact, the alternative splicing patterns are found to be very different between different kinds of species.
As the following article states, “A major question in vertebrate evolutionary biology is “how do physical and behavioral differences arise if we have a very similar set of genes to that of the mouse, chicken, or frog?”,,, ”the papers show that most alternative splicing events differ widely between even closely related species. “The alternative splicing patterns are very different even between humans and chimpanzees,”
In fact ., due to alternative slicing, “Alternatively spliced isoforms,,, 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 (Pan et al., 2008), collectively leading to perhaps over a million distinct polypeptides obtained by post-translational modification of products of all possible transcript isoforms,,”
Finding gene regulatory networks, instead of genes, to be running the show is completely antagonistic to the ‘bottom-up’ gene-centric view of Darwinists.
Here is a note to that effect