Dr.GH
Posts: 2333 Joined: May 2002
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Quote (dvunkannon @ Aug. 29 2012,14:12) | http://www.sciencedaily.com/release....534.htm
Over in the Books thread, I had said at the beginning of the summer that I was reading three books with the intent to write reviews of them. The first was Evolution, a View from the 21st Century, by James Shapiro.
I did finish it, and outlined a review, and I'm inching towards finishing said opus. In the meantime, one of the things that Shapiro harps on in the book is that SNP - point mutations - are not the be all and end all of variation. He is at pains to denigrate their importance compared to HGT, jumping genes, and whole genome doubling.
So I'm collecting stories of SNP that do make a difference, and the above story is one such. A single base change enables some horse lineages to learn new gaits.
ANother story I saw recently is that FOXP2 in humans is different by two base changes from chimps... |
I like this one:
Acceleration of Emergence of Bacterial Antibiotic Resistance in Connected Microenvironments
Qiucen Zhang, Guillaume Lambert, David Liao, Hyunsung Kim, Kristelle Robin, Chih-kuan Tung, Nader Pourmand, and Robert H. Austin
Science 23 September 2011: 1764-1767. [DOI:10.1126/science.1208747]
-------------- "Science is the horse that pulls the cart of philosophy."
L. Susskind, 2004 "SMOLIN VS. SUSSKIND: THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE"
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