Genome complexity: Removing foreign or damaged DNA (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, July 13, 2018, 18:31 (2107 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

David : But horizontal transfer seems to be one of the ways evolution has progressed. I've just presented that.

Tony:Stop and think about this. The story of horizontal gene transfer is based on finding the same or similar genes inside separate species. This forces them to make up stories about how it happened. They have no evidence that it happened, but it is required to explain their data within the framework of evolution. This screws with timelines and cladistics. The just so story of mosquito transfer is not backed by evidence. Moreover, this safeguard would prevent horizontal transfer.

I am delighted with your skepticism. However the article below accepts that the transfers do occur in bacteria and similar simple celled animals. I agree with you that in complex multicellular it can be questioned, because genes can have multiple results in appearance and in activity with the slicing and dicing by the interpretive mechanisms in the genome. On the other hand DNA is huge within amoeba, longer than ours but with the same bases, so just rearrangement can make a gene look like someone else's gene. The article uses transfer by parasite bites, viruses, etc . to explain it, because it is hard to imagine my horses' genes jumping into me. The article is long but informative and I've entered it before here, but on our site is will not reproduce, so I looked it up again:

https://aeon.co/essays/genes-that-jump-species-does-this-shake-the-tree-of-life