Though it isn't the evolution everyone talks about.
True. But it is a system which is predicated on mutation and natural selection.
It has been somewhat of an article of faith in biology that change in biological systems, hence evolution itself, is just the result of defects in the copying mechanisms. The cellular machinery does indeed have sophisticated mechanism to guard against errors. The adaptive immune system shows that at least one biological system has explicit machinery for producing such change. It will be very interesting to see if any vaguely similar, although much less obvious methods, might exist in germline reproduction in any species. If so, we would have the fingerprints of something which might account for the Cambrian explosion. Kind of the biological equivalent of the 3K cosmic background radiation.
All it would take is some such mechanism as seen in the T-cell replication, but functioning on the body plan HOX genes, and suddenly you would have very strange offspring. If this happened during the pre-Cambrian soft-bodied stage of evolution, for which we have almost no fossil evidence, then it would fit very well with the observed record. It is possible that such a mechaism might be detected in defunct DNA sequences of modern life. Just a WAG.
I am referring to evolution as the opinion that nothing but "chance and necessity" have produced us. I even have no problem with considering humans as the "third chimpanzee" as one anthropologist called us.
You have no problem with evolution then. You don't like atheists. Thats the only problem AFAIK.
And other chimps have figured out how to split the atom and found out the universe had a beginning.
Did you know that nature did that on its own in Niger a few million years ago. A self assemblying water moderated reactor no less.
Why are chimps doing science at all? There's no evolutionary answer to these kind of questions imo.
I think we are pretty close to that answer, now that both human and chimp genomes have been sequence. We'ed be a lot closer if the question was between mice and rats, but we are a bit more limited in the research we can do on humans. I assume the approach will be to add or delete genes in chimp embryos and see what happens. Most likely will not occur in the USA for obvious reasons, but I doubt the Asian researchers will be as hindered. I've read some speculation that perhaps 50 genes might account for most of the difference. So that is not that big of a research project. I'm pretty sure it will be done, despite the handwringing it will cause. |
