Comments on: Resurrecting Evolution to Solve an 800-Million-Year-Old Puzzle

By: Ed Rybicki

Ed Rybicki — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:52:35 +0000

PS: “which they dupped Anc.3-11)”. Dubbed…B-)

By: Ed Rybicki

Ed Rybicki — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:50:07 +0000

Great story! And, incidentally, another useful counter to the intelligent design principle of irreducible complexity – but you knew that.

One small quibble, however: you say “Its simpler ancestor was made up of more versatile proteins. As the proteins duplicated and degenerated, their arrangement became more complicated”….

The simpler ancestor had fewer MULTIFUNCTIONAL proteins – and by gene duplication and subsequent divergence, the descendant proteins could specialise into those different functions, rather than degenerate.

A parallel here are the capsid proteins of picornaviruses: these build the same kind and size of quasi-icosahedral shell using three proteins, as other viruses do using one – by gene duplications which resulted in different proteins taking the places of the same protein forced into slightly different configurations. This also allows more sophisticated structural changes associated with cell entry of picornaviruses as opposed to their simpler brethren.

By: Jess Tauber

Jess Tauber — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 01:18:23 +0000

This is what happens in language structure- parts that were once more versatile end up both more specialized on the one hand, and also dependent contextually upon others to get their meaning. It would be interesting to know how many other fungal genes have undergone such reworking- is this just a fluke, or a general trend? There are a great many parallelisms between the organizations of the genome and proteome and the organization of language. We know that in the latter case there are different types of language, both in terms of syntax and morphology and also in terms of lexicon and phonology. There are different types of genome- are there also different types of PROTEOME???

Jess Tauber

By: Lab Lemming

Lab Lemming — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:38:39 +0000

What sort is the fossil record for these things? Is it mostly molecular?

That linked page is cute, and I like that they a fairly upfront about the poor precision.

By: Lab Lemming

Lab Lemming — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:45:22 +0000

Where does the number 800 million years come from? [CZ: It's an estimate for the age of the common ancestor of today's fungi, based on the fossil record and mutations in fungus DNA.]

By: John Kubie

John Kubie — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:02:14 +0000

Very, very cool. Tiny comment: eye does not need a lens to form a sharp image. Pinhole cameras are lens-less.