Something to ponder - DNA Jumps Between Animal Species. No One Knows How Often.

Fascinating... I thought horizontal gene transfer was just a protozoan/archaeote/bacterium thing.
This shows how much of a spectrum that life really exists on. Individual species can get to be really hard to define, because hybridization is possible in many ways. There is nothing really "fixed" about any given genome of a creature. When we see something that we label a "species", it is just one point on the vast gradient of the possible combinations of alleles on the genome, but it just so happens to be one of the viable combinations. The vast majority of those possible combinations will never be naturally produced by organic life.

I wonder how many possibly useful traits that humans have snagged from this process in the past?
I really love studying biology, but the more idea, the more I realize how much more there is to learn, and it begins to get overwhelming 😅. For instance, finds like this make it seem even harder to attempt to reconstruct what the tree of life may have been like in the past.
 
Fascinating... I thought horizontal gene transfer was just a protozoan/archaeote/bacterium thing.
This shows how much of a spectrum that life really exists on. Individual species can get to be really hard to define, because hybridization is possible in many ways. There is nothing really "fixed" about any given genome of a creature. When we see something that we label a "species", it is just one point on the vast gradient of the possible combinations of alleles on the genome, but it just so happens to be one of the viable combinations. The vast majority of those possible combinations will never be naturally produced by organic life.

I wonder how many possibly useful traits that humans have snagged from this process in the past?
I really love studying biology, but the more idea, the more I realize how much more there is to learn, and it begins to get overwhelming 😅. For instance, finds like this make it seem even harder to attempt to reconstruct what the tree of life may have been like in the past.
Yggdrasil has the answers. :LOL:
 
Fascinating... I thought horizontal gene transfer was just a protozoan/archaeote/bacterium thing.
This shows how much of a spectrum that life really exists on. Individual species can get to be really hard to define, because hybridization is possible in many ways. There is nothing really "fixed" about any given genome of a creature. When we see something that we label a "species", it is just one point on the vast gradient of the possible combinations of alleles on the genome, but it just so happens to be one of the viable combinations. The vast majority of those possible combinations will never be naturally produced by organic life.

I wonder how many possibly useful traits that humans have snagged from this process in the past?
I really love studying biology, but the more idea, the more I realize how much more there is to learn, and it begins to get overwhelming 😅. For instance, finds like this make it seem even harder to attempt to reconstruct what the tree of life may have been like in the past.
Good to hear you enjoyed this article

As a zoo, I love learning just how complex life is and how species differences are not all that significant, a Dog or a Horses are just as complex and evolved as we are.

Here is something else to feed your brain

 
Very interesting video. My brain mass has increased by 2%.

Speaking of complexity, I was wondering how complexity would be measured. The most reasonable measure of complexity I would posit would be the number of base pairs on the genome, because that would be directly indicative of how many procedures were being performed, structures being built, et cetera. Let's say we go with that... who has the largest genome? Who is the most complex?
Well, actually it is the Amoeba Polychaos dubium, with 670,000,000,000 base pairs.
That goes well above Paris japonica, the largest plant genome, with 150,000,000,000 pairs, and still above Protopterus aethiopicus, the largest vertebrate genome, with 130,000,000,000 pairs.
Not to mention, it utterly demolishes the human genome in terms of complexity, with a mere 3,000,000,000.
So, I guess humans are not the most complex creatures around with those kinds of rookie numbers.

just as complex and evolved as we are
Yeah, the idea of being 'more evolved' was always strange to me, as it implied there was some sort of "ladder of being" that could be ascended or something (and usually people say that the goal of the ascent is to become human-like, coincidentally). I guess if there were a measure of "how evolved" a creature were, it would be the number of generations behind it, because that would be the number of times natural selection has refined its form. Therefore, fruit flies would be some of the most-evolved creatures in the world.
 
Back
Top