Saturday, February 05, 2011

Horizontal Gene Transfer Getting Embarrassingly Complicated for MacroEvolution

A suite of 23 genes has apparently been "transferred" directly from one fungus to another. Bacteria are known to swap genes, and have a known method to do so. For higher organisms, they can only guess how some of these gene transfers occurred. They need a mechanism though, because humans have dozens if not hundreds of genes which sponges and below also posses, but are not possessed by anything between mammal and sponge. That's a perplexing problem to explain by evolutionary means. No worries though, if you read the link you will see that they did not even try to find an explanatory mechanism (in other words, how it could be done). They just assume that since the genes have jumped, that evolution must have done it!

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