this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
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Science Memes

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Evolution isn't linear. (mander.xyz)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (3 children)

The discovery of horizontal gene transfer implies that it's more like a web than a tree.

"Biologist Johann Peter Gogarten suggests "the original metaphor of a tree no longer fits the data from recent genome research" therefore "biologists should use the metaphor of a mosaic to describe the different histories combined in individual genomes and use the metaphor of a net to visualize the rich exchange and cooperative effects of HGT among microbes".

I look forward to this dinosaur = chicken colloquialism being inevitably discarded.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

It's funny, I remember being 7 years old and thinking two things.

  1. T-rex feet look very similarly to chicken feet, they must be descended from the T-Rex.

  2. I'm 7, there's no way this is true.

I immediately wrote it off as being incorrect. There's no way people actually believe this right?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

How is horizontal gene transfer between microbes in any way relevant to a discussion about the ancestry of chickens that only reaches back to the dinosauria clade? Chickens are invariably a sub-group of the bigger group dinosaurs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Not just microbes. HGT has been observed in carnivorous plants as well. It could be much more prevalent than we think.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Chickens are dinosaurs in the sense that they're also tetrapods. A dinosaur is an evolutionary group in which all members have a common ancestor population that is distinct from the rest of the evolutionary tree. So too with tetrapods, isopods, primates, arachnids, etc. So anyway, it's true that birds are dinosaurs, but it's not a very useful description.