REC
Posts: 638 Joined: Sep. 2006
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I love the last post! Clearly on MSNBC, Dawkins should dispense with the simple, but effective analogy, that describes 99% of all cases, and start discussing the impact of topological variation in phylogenomics. Oh yeah, Dianne, there's this one group using a set of algorithms that didn't get totally clean crisp results that from a mountain of data and yeah, that disproves the entire field.
Quotemining one group that had difficulty parsing huge amount of genomic data into pretty trees is pretty low, especially considering they conclude it generally worked.
I could give most undergrads a chicken, human, mouse, chimp, and zebrafish sequence of anything, and using BLAST, I'm sure most would have a clean phylogeny. Even the most trivial alignment of insulin yields a decent tree:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast....4;86444
EDIT: you have to ignore the Insulin-like duplications, or turn the Max Seq def down to .5 (you could treat that as a case study in topology: gene duplications make complications!)
Would ya look at that? Humans and chimps together, other mammals, birds, frogs and toads, then bony fish.....Took about 15 seconds...
Where's the design? Why can't one well-designed sequence function in all these animals?
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