Previously, it has been shown that genes that duplicated in the same time window and are clustered in the MHC regions suggests that a proto-MHC region was present in the last common ancestor of chordates, this is further supported by conservation of clusters with the urochordates.

The conservation of the clustering with arthropods suggests that a proto-MHC region was even older, present in Urbilateria.

Several studies now suggest that many important genes for the Adaptive Immune System were "waiting" for recruitment.

Our studies support the general statement that AIS appears after the jawless/jawed vertebrate split. However our study further reveals the fact that AIS is in its twilight in amphioxus and the evolution of the molecules in amphioxus are waiting for recruitment by the emergence of AIS.

see here, here , and here

It's not Yasgur's Farm, but what happens at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria this July promises to be far more transforming for the world than Woodstock. What it amounts to is a gathering of 16 biologists and philosophers of rock star stature – let's call them "the Altenberg 16" – who recognize that the theory of evolution which most practicing biologists accept and which is taught in classrooms today, is inadequate in explaining our existence. It's pre the discovery of DNA, lacks a theory for body form and does not accomodate "other" new phenomena. So the theory Charles Darwin gave us, which was dusted off and repackaged 70 years ago, seems about to be reborn as the "Extended Evolutionary Synthesis".

here

Despite the stunning variety of photoreceptor organs, every animal uses the same kind of light-capturing molecule to do this job. Insects, humans, clams, and scallops all use opsins. Not only can we trace the history of eyes through differences in the structure of their opsins, but we have good evidence that we can thank bacteria for these molecules in the first place.

The bacterial past can be used to our advantage in studying the diseases of mitochondria — in fact, some of the best experimental models for these diseases are bacteria. This is powerful because we can do all kinds of experiments with bacteria that are not possible with human cells… [European researchers] were able to simulate parts of a human mitochondrial disease in a bacterium, with virtually the same change in metabolism. This is putting a many-billion-year part of our history to work for us.

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

One thing that has always interested me about computer simulated evolution of networks is that virtually (pun intended) all of them turn out to be non-modular. This has been pointed out in the literature (Thompson et. al 1998).

Modularity itself is something that the front-loading hypothesis predicts:

If life was designed and our analogy to human design is substantial, then we would predict life would be modular…Modularity enhances evolution and thus the perpetuation of design.
The Design Matrix p.167-168

The researchers running these sort of simulations make use of duplication, recombination, mutation, selection until they see the relevant result. However, there is a lot more to the evolution of life-like networks.

Read the rest of this entry »

It's rather amazing that despite the fact that I have been tapped into the ID debate for close to a decade, and more than that, reading Mike Gene's posts for just that long, reading his book still felt entirely new to me. A testament to how original and fresh his thesis is. Since I am still making my way through the book, I have yet to discover what it ultimately delivers. However, each chapter reads like a thriller, you simply do not want to skip to the end.

Read the rest of this entry »