(July 15, 2014 at 2:19 pm)Rhythm Wrote:(July 15, 2014 at 2:08 pm)SteveII Wrote: It's not one. If we have 20,000 genes, that would be 2000-6000 orphaned genes.You can take the numbers up or down and it won't matter. Where did the other 18-14k come from? This is probably news to some, but common ancestry ceased to be a theory with the discovery and application of genetics.
I don't believe it has. You would expect to see vast similarities in genes between living organisms. I would assume that there are a limited number of possibilities to construct a living, replicating, and interconnected cell to form a larger organism. It would stand to reason that on a genetic level, there would be nearly identical building blocks.
Actually, it seems that genetics might have opened up more questions than it answers (like harmful vs beneficial mutation rates, not enough time, orphaned genes, how GRNs came about, and others I am still reading about).
